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What Does the Text Mean by the Autonomous Art of Abstract Expressionism

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Abstruse expressionism is among the many Western art movements that Aboriginal art has been compared to. That is to say, Aboriginal art is understood through abstract expressionism. But what would happen if nosotros reversed the poles and understood abstract expressionism through Aboriginal art? One of the things that Aboriginal art might bring to our understanding of abstract expressionism is a sense of meaningfulness, or even of meaningfulness without meaning. Indeed, information technology is by means of this category that nosotros might distinguish abstract expressionism from abstruse art in general.

In this paper, I will outline this stardom through the work of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, and attempt to show how it plays out in the criticism of one of Cavell's bully followers, the fine art historian Michael Fried. We will see how the search for the 'intention' behind abstract expressionism is replaced past the need to find the 'motivation' that drives abstraction. It is for this reason that something ended in art with the passing of abstract expressionism, at least until it returned with the arrival of contemporary Aboriginal art.

* * *

Ane day in 1990—over 20 years ago now—the art dealer Mary Macha decided to take her friend and client, Kimberley artist Rover Thomas, known for his stiff lines and monochromatic surfaces, to the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. Thomas, along with Trevor Nickolls, had recently been selected to correspond Australia at the Venice Biennale—the first Aboriginal artists to be included in the exhibition. Although Thomas had previously visited Perth and Darwin, he had never been outside of the country, and Macha thought it would exist skillful for him to see, for the first fourth dimension, a major museum full of artists from other cultures in order to prepare him for the experience. Thomas, who was originally born in the Nifty Sandy Desert, had moved with his family as a young boy to the Kimberley and the Gija-speaking community, where he worked equally a stockman at various cattle stations. He took up painting at the historic period of 54 when he was entrusted with the designs for the Gija Krill Krill ceremony.

Thomas had had virtually no straight contact with European art. And, from a European perspective, the idea of comparing Aboriginal and European art, and particularly in terms of their shared abstraction, had not really taken off past 1990. If such a comparison had been possible earlier in the century for the likes of Margaret Preston, it later seemed like something that should no longer exist pursued. In the wake of Imants Tillers' appropriation of Michael Nelson Jagamara's 5 Dreamings (1984), and the storm of protest information technology incited from both urban Aboriginal artists and politically sensitive white critics, there was more accent on the incommensurability between the two cultures, with the idea that any European appointment with Aboriginal art could effect but in exploitation and misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, it was from across this gulf—and against all of the prevailing cultural and political considerations—that Thomas reached out. In the NGA, in front end of American painter Mark Rothko'due south 1957 #xx (1957), Thomas famously remarked in breviloquent manner: 'Who'due south that bugger who paints like me?' To take upwards the NGA's Curator of Aboriginal Art, Wally Caruana:

One of Thomas'southward most enduring images is Roads Meeting (1987). An image of reconciliation, the image of the black line, symbolising a bitumen route, crossing the red line of an bequeathed path, suggests an inescapable reality: the mixture of peoples sharing the same lands in the contemporary earth. [And in the same way] The need for artists to express the human condition may have moved Thomas to comment on 'that bugger' Rothko'south painting.

Figure one. Mark Rothko, Primitive Idol 1945, ink and gouache on newspaper, 55.6 × 76.2 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection, 157.1978.a-b. Digital image: © The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Mark Rothko/ARS. Licensed by Viscopy.

This episode has been retold many times in Australian art history; mostly, as in the passage above, every bit an allegory of cross-cultural commutation. Here we have an Ancient artist—acting against the prevailing mood of distrust and scepticism—licensing the kinds of comparison then largely off limits to white art critics. And afterward Thomas'due south response there was, we might say—rather accordingly, given that his primary Dreaming afterward became a cyclone—the deluge. Aboriginal art was compared almost indiscriminately to French impressionism, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and minimal art. Artists like Emily Kngwarreye were variously compared to Claude Monet, Paul Klee, A.R. Penck and Ralph Balson. Only at the take chances of repeating the same mistake, I would like to stick with Thomas's initial insight and consider why information technology is that the comparison with abstract expressionism is the right ane for Aboriginal fine art. Nevertheless, I would like to invert the usual—absolutely Eurocentric—order in which this comparing tends to take place: that information technology is abstract expressionism that helps us understand Ancient art. Instead, I want to insist—confronting all chronology, all conventional conceptions of cultural influence and dissemination—that it is Ancient fine art that helps u.s.a. understand abstruse expressionism, that it is time to ask what Aboriginal art has to teach united states of america virtually abstract expressionism.

Of course, Thomas'due south remarks are generally understood, in a patronising fashion, to commit that classic art-historical mistake of isomorphism. This is the belief that because two works of art expect the same, they must mean the same thing. Thomas seems—and this is undoubtedly the source of the slightly superior sense of humor it is possible to feel at his remarks—to be mistaking Rothko's work as existence like his ain, despite all of the obvious cultural differences, ceremonial purposes and creative intentions separating the two. But what if Thomas sees a deeper connexion between them, or even pre-emptively understands the dangers of isomorphism, of thinking that one can simply cross cultures on the basis of visual resemblance? What if what he was commenting on when he looked at Rothko'southward work was its mystery, and maybe even incomprehensibility, to him, just as he was enlightened that his own work was mysterious and incomprehensible to its predominantly white audition? What if he recognised Rothko as an artist whose surreptitious was unknown to him, only as Aboriginal art—even in such mod forms as Thomas's—is nearly a secret caught upwardly in enormously complicated and often strictly regulated protocols regarding the sharing and withholding of culturally sensitive data?

To begin to explicate this, allow usa take two absolutely typical pieces of Aboriginal fine art criticism that appeared recently in Australian fine art magazines. The first is by Australian art curator John McPhee in Art Monthly Commonwealth of australia, and is a review of a show past Mornington Island artist Sally Gabori. After admitting that he cannot read the specific iconography of Gabori'southward work, and that he knows nil of the country she paints, he asks what it is that moves him so intensely about the piece of work. To which he answers: 'most significantly these are paintings of extraordinary commitment'. Alternatively, take the response of American English Professor Timothy Morton in the journal Subject area to the abstract weaves of Pintupi artist Yukultji Napangati, which he describes as existing in a 'tug between what has been done and what cannot exist known', placing a responsibleness upon their viewer 'not to intone ritualistically well-nigh their hopeless entrapment in their cultural matrix'.

Perchance the truly interesting affair about both of these pieces of contemporary art criticism is that they play out a precedent fix by i of the great early commentators of Aboriginal art, the anthropologist Eric Michaels. Some 25 years ago, Michaels wrote a ground-breaking essay on the Yuendumu Doors, painted on a secondary schoolhouse in Yuendumu in the Central Desert, and one of the foundational objects of the mod Aboriginal art movement. In his essay, Michaels speaks of the fact that, 'in a way reminiscent of abstract expressionism, the viewer is encouraged to perceive meaningfulness but not meaning itself'.

These three pieces of writing are unlike—ane past a curator, one by a professor of English and i by an anthropologist; one a review of an exhibition, one on a single piece of work of art and one on a complex post-colonial object. But all conclude in a similar fashion: not with a specific reading or estimation of the meaning of the piece of work of art, just with a general invocation of its meaningfulness. It is, of course, easy to see this particular grade of spectatorship as though information technology were a symptom of something other than a reaction to the work itself. What we have here is an 'attunement' towards the other as a 'political' expression of sympathy. In their date with Aboriginal art, the viewer enacts a certain kind of gestural politics that in all likelihood is 'inauthentic', and that, perhaps more than anything else, is the deferral or displacement of whatever 'real' political action. Put simply, Ancient art constructs a particular white subjectivity. And I would even advise that the fine art is about this: even in its original context, the piece of work does not entirely reveal its meaning to everybody. Rather, in the 'tribal' setting—hence the illustration with the circumstances in which a white viewer encounters information technology in a museum or fine art gallery—a procedure of ceremony is enacted around an occult or esoteric meaning. And, crucially, this ceremony is non the experience of the work'south meaning, but the enactment of a meaningfulness. There is an emphasis by the artist, which is understood past their audience, not on the actual content of the Dreaming stories themselves, simply on the fact that they are done the 'right mode', that they are performed appropriately.

What, in the end, is the true shock of Aboriginal art? In a way—and this undoubtedly accounts for its double effect of anachronism as something that comes both out of a afar past and from a future that is yet to come—information technology is its manus-fabricated quality in a time of postal service-modernistic reproduction. That is, Tillers could not accept been more than wrong when he spoke of the dots in Ancient painting as those of mechanical reproduction. They are, in fact, the very opposite: a sign of the presence of the artist during a period in which they are supposed to be 'dead'. Indeed, we read Aboriginal art through the artist'southward subjectivity, or even intentionality, equally indicated by their painterly 'bear upon', in something of a reference to the founding assumptions of the discipline of fine art history itself. The hand of the artist returns precisely at a time when information technology was idea to have disappeared, bringing with it all of those classic problems of forgery, authenticity and creative quality. Information technology is really only in Aboriginal art today that we have raised the issue of attribution in Australian art, and—every bit auction houses will confirm—actually just with regard to Aboriginal art that we can meaningfully raise questions of skillful and bad work, both between artists and past the aforementioned creative person. And, against the whole post-modern soapbox of irony, nosotros see in Aboriginal art an unquestioned sincerity: no one seriously doubts that Aboriginal artists mean what they paint; and even if this is understood as tradition, the ground of contemporary Aboriginal art is that this tradition is freely called or intended. In all of these means, Ancient art constitutes that most impossible of returns, that—with both terms being given equal weight—of a certain abstruse expressionism.

Of grade, the obvious connection is that the original abstract expressionist artists were themselves interested in 'primitive' fine art and the idea of the 'primitive'. Rothko gave his early works such titles every bit Primitive Idol (1945), Cardinal Landscape (1945), The Source (1945) and Ancestral Imprint (1946). Barnett Newman wrote his famous introduction to the show The Ideographic Flick (1947), in which he spoke in relation to the Indians of the Northwest Coast of shape every bit 'a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract idea-complex, a carrier of awesome feelings [the artist] felt before the terror of the unknowable'. Adolph Gottlieb, too, spoke of 'all primitive expression revealing the abiding sensation of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear'. Needless to say, this reference to archaic art by the abstract expressionists has been variously interpreted, and alternately approved of and criticised. Irving Sandler, in his 1976 book The Triumph of American Painting, suggests that artists turned to American Indian art not then much because information technology embodied terror as because it evoked spirituality and community. Ann Gibson, in the chapter 'Painting through Primitivism' of her Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, emphasises the incongruity of these white artists' nostalgia for another culture while overlooking the actual Afro-American artists in their midst (and, possibly even more pertinent for our argument hither, there was also a largely unremarked-upon Native American artist amidst the abstract expressionists, the Chippewa-born George Morrison). But, in fact, we must grasp very carefully what the abstract expressionist artists were trying to do here. If we read their evocation of the 'primitive' intently, we will see a very particular argument sally. The 'primitive' is understood as innocent and kid-like, surely, simply more exactly as implying a kind of pre-linguistic or pre-semiotic land. It is nearly every bit though it is a cry without words, an intention that cannot exist conveyed, a meaningfulness that is unable to become a definitive meaning. De Kooning wrote that 'The first man who began to paint, whoever he was, must take intended it'. And Newman similarly spoke of an 'original man, shouting out his consonants, doing so in yells of awe and anger'.

It is just this kind of outcome that the artists wanted in their own work. Again, of class, in that location is a whole diversity of statements made by the abstract expressionists and their critics every bit to how they wanted their piece of work to signify, to mean, to part. But hither I just want to draw out certain threads. Starting time of all, they sought to do away with all 'objective'—by which we might hateful conventional, recognisable, socially shared and causeless—ways of communication (which, for all of their sociability and recognisability, were considered not universal plenty). This is the ground of the famous distinction between 'object-thing' and 'subject-matter' fabricated past Meyer Schapiro in his essay 'The Liberating Quality of the Avant-garde', in which he states that what must be avoided is the turning of the artist's feelings into static and reproducible forms or symbols: object-thing as opposed to subject-matter. But the abstruse expressionists also rejected unconscious symbols or symbols of the unconscious. This was the basis for their eventual dismissal of surrealism, which must be explained not only as a chauvinistic assertion of the American, as opposed to the French, but also as a result of the realisation that the surrealist dream-paradigm had become a technical and easily imitated vocabulary. Newman spoke of surrealism in his essay 'The Plasmic Image' every bit a 'mundane expression', while Gottlieb insisted that 'for us it is non plenty to illustrate dreams'. And finally, and perhaps most complexly, the abstruse expressionists also rejected transcendent symbols or symbols of the transcendent; that is, symbols that indicated merely the inability to signify. This seems to be the meaning of Newman'due south subtle and intellectually brilliant refusal of whatever reading of the piece of work in terms of beauty in his essay 'The Sublime is Now', in which he as well criticises Immanuel Kant's version of the sublime, which for him is too 'formal', too 'hierarchical', too much similar beauty, in terms of its objective signification:

The failure of European art to attain the sublime is due to its bullheaded desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an fine art inside a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of dazzler, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface or a archetype stable 1).

However, while the abstract expressionists reject any recognisable—objective, symbolic, transcendent—language, they also reject any elementary refusal to signify, or the opening up of their piece of work to take chances and contingency. This means that they altitude themselves from that aspect of surrealism information technology shares with Dadaism: its automatism. As Robert Motherwell writes in the introduction to his book The Dada Painters and Poets: '[The abstract expressionists] are at the antipodes of automatism and machinery, and no less from the cunning means of reason'. And this, again, is why we might make a distinction—and not only for chauvinistic reasons—between the abstruse expressionists and those French or French-inspired tachist or informel artists similar Jean-Paul Riopelle (and the Canadian group Les Automatistes associated with him), whose Knight Watch (1953) is meant to take come about outside of the creative person'southward control. By contrast, Pollock and all those later abstruse expressionists who spoke for him would ever strenuously deny the element of take a chance in his work, asserting such things as 'I control the menstruation of paint. There is no accident' or 'I am literally inside my paintings'. Indeed, strictly speaking, we would not even draw abstract expressionism as gestural, if past gesture we mean something autonomous, a loss of command, the hand of the artist carrying out an action beyond the creative person's intentions.

The effect for the abstract expressionists is a particular kind of paradigm that is not exactly symbolic, nor that other favourite word hieratic, insofar as these imply a certain objectivity, recognisability or translatability. Rather, what nosotros have is a serial of idiosyncratic marks that, although loosely repeated and in some ways identified with particular artists, are never exactly repeated, and whose meaning never entirely becomes clear. They would constitute a vocabulary only not quite a language; or, better, a weep or even words but not exactly a speech. The abstract expressionists, of course, had several names for the item kind of image they were trying to create: the plasmic (Newman), the ideographic (Newman once more), the glyph (David Smith) and the pictographic (Gottlieb and Arshile Gorky). And there were several aggressive attempts past the artists to explain what they were doing and the particular kind of fine art they were creating. Newman in 'The Sublime is Now' writes: 'The artist must seek to throw off the impediments of retention, association, nostalgia, fable, myth, or what have yous, that have been the devices of European painting' and to make paintings 'out of ourselves, out of our own feelings'. And Motherwell, in a 1959 Schoolhouse of New York exhibition catalogue (citing Odilon Redon), writes: '[My works] inspire and are not meant to be defined. They make up one's mind naught. They place the states, every bit does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor'.

This rejection of symbols did not forestall abstract expressionist works from having significant (or, more precisely, meaningfulness). Indeed, their entire reception depended on the claim that they somehow communicated the greatest and most exalted of themes. Nosotros might begin with the statements of the artists themselves: Clyfford All the same once wrote a letter to museum director Gordon Smith, claiming that his work stood against the whole 'collectivist rationale of our gild', which he equated with a class of 'intellectual suicide'. There is, of course, Newman's notorious claim, repeated in an interview with Dorothy Seckler, that if just people could read his work properly 'it would mean the cease of state commercialism and totalitarianism'. And this proud tradition has been continued in the subsequent reception of abstruse expressionism, from critics writing immediately after the move up to the present. For example, in 1950 the Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), René d'Harnoncourt, issued a statement with two other gallery directors to the issue that they recognised 'the humanistic value of abstract art equally an expression of thought and emotion and the bones aspirations towards freedom and lodge'. This is extended and politicised in critic Max Kozloff's 1973 'American Painting During the Cold War', in which he links abstract expressionism with French existentialism and, more generally, with an 'equivocal notwithstanding profound glorifying of [the freedom of] American civilization'. And this, needless to say, has led to ongoing disputes as to whether the artists were for or against their gild, whether abstract expressionism was radical or bourgeois, all the way up to charges that abstract expressionism—not only in its exhibition but also in its class—was a tool of American imperialism and CIA plans to defeat communism during the Common cold War.

It is this generalised sense of meaningfulness that is the authentic feel of abstract expressionism, both its true 'subject' and the means past which it is to be distinguished from those other art movements for which it is often mistaken (tachism, art informel, color field). We get the sense of a kind of semiotic pressure, a compelling need to impart something to us. A feeling that the creative person is seeking to communicate something to us, but is unable to say exactly what it is. If the piece of work can be said to be sublime—a give-and-take applied to information technology not only by Newman—it lies in the radical disjunction between the work and what it is understood to speak of. (This is how Newman uses the discussion and how, as we shall see in a moment, Harold Rosenberg uses it as the 'catholic', despite most readings of his work.) Its message is not transcendent—Newman is right there—which would imply some universal and unchanging content that could finally exist intuited some other way, but is to be understood only through its symbols, even though they are inadequate. (But there is no undeclared or declarable mismatch between them.) That is to say, to push button the paradox to the limit, what we experience in abstract expressionism—what we are intended to experience—is an equivalence between the artist or the work of art and the spectator, a total coming-together without excess or remainder, but without it ever becoming clear what it is that passes between them. Sculptor David Smith wrote in 1953: 'A work of art or an object of interest is always completed past the viewer'. Hans Hoffman, in reply to a question, once asked rhetorically: 'If you practice not understand a human who speaks a language you exercise non speak, is this therefore proof that the human babbles merely nonsense?' There is, henceforth, no limit as to what signifies in abstract expressionist piece of work: everything is admittedly charged with meaning, although there is no sense of what, exactly, is being communicated. It is perhaps not past coincidence that David Anfam, in his Abstract Expressionism, cites a passage from Henry James, which sounds like a description not just of one of Pollock's drip paintings, but of the—I would say admittedly commensurate—process past which the consciousness of the spectator, underwritten past what they take to be the intention of the creative person, extends to the furthest reaches of his canvases, down to the smallest particles of painterly presence. Indeed, we run into something of this attitude in the writings of Michael Fried on Pollock, all the way from his early description of the spectator'southward eyesight 'moving without resistance' through the work in 'Iii American Painters' to his assertion that every office of Pollock'due south all-overs is charged with 'pictorial intensity' in his review of Pollock's 1998 retrospective at MoMA. Here is the Henry James passage relevant to Pollock, according to Anfam: 'Experience is never limited, and information technology is never completed; information technology is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the sleeping accommodation of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue'.

All of this aspiration towards significant requires a certain attitude by the maker, and accounts from the period are total of descriptions of the creative person as 'sincere', 'committed', 'authentic' and 'responsible'. Equally, it requires from the spectator a kind of openness and willingness to appoint with the unknown, which tin can also be interpreted in a number of ways. Stepping back a lilliputian, the entire interaction between work and spectator can be diagnosed equally belonging to a period of consumerist-inspired individualism, existentialism and the ethics of personal responsibleness in an emerging post-liberal lodge. It is a miracle quite rightly field of study to the broadest sociological analyses, under such headings as 'Individualism, Universalism and the Cold War', 'The Discrediting of Collectivist Ideology' and 'Narcissism in Chaos: Subjectivity, Credo, Modern Man and Women'. The engagement with the work of art would crave a sure subjective disposition or comportment, a kind of spiritual practise in self-formation of the sort described by Michel Foucault or Pierre Hadot. We might recall here Schapiro's description of the effects of the piece of work in 'The Liberating Quality of Advanced Art': 'If painting and sculpture do non communicate, they induce an attitude of communion and contemplation. They offering to many an explanation of what is regarded as function of religious life: a sincere and humble submission to a spiritual object'. And no doubtfulness all of this tin can be analysed in terms of 'bad faith'—or, to utilise T.J. Clark's term, 'vulgarity'—just as we would say the same thing of gimmicky white Australians who bow down before works of Aboriginal art as though that in itself could somehow overcome or better social injustices.

To extend this 'contextualisation' of abstruse expressionism, I would suggest that the whole enterprise of fine art history is part of this critical, desublimatory project, whether it realises it or non. Infamously, nosotros might think of that arch-populist Robert Hughes, who in his American Visions television receiver serial stood in front of Newman's Stations of the Cross series (1958–66) and repeated the artist's stated appetite—already in a fashion the work's desublimation—that he wanted to match the accomplishment of Michelangelo. 'Sorry, Barney', Hughes contemptuously riposted, 'you lot lost'.

Just perhaps even the great Clement Greenberg carried something of this impulse to tear down abstract expressionism (we might, indeed, diagnose in him a class of art-historical terror before the sublimity of the work). His crucial retrospective essay 'After Abstract Expressionism' is not merely the tracing of the fate or aftermath of the so-called New York School, but in its very historicisation—and positing of an always comparativist artful 'quality'—is itself this aftermath. Put simply, the aestheticisation of abstract expressionism that Greenberg inaugurates, the seeing of it every bit troping its own medium, is a way—absolutely, against Greenberg's own conception of what he was doing—of giving the work meaning (and in this regard there is a stiff continuity between Greenberg's modernist self-reflexivity and the post-modern 'criticality' that follows him). Asserting this pregnant brings on precisely a loss of, or falling away from, that meaningfulness that abstract expressionism is authentically almost. And at moments Greenberg even admits this. After speaking of a 'self-critical' process that would go us to what he calls the 'irreducible essence of art', he then goes on to qualify this by asking: 'What is the ultimate source of value or quality in art?' And immediately answers: 'conception' or 'inspiration', of which, he says, exactly with reference to that all-signifying quality of abstract expressionism we have been trying to put our finger on: 'The exact choices in colour, medium, size, shape, proportion are what determine the quality of the result, and these choices depend solely on inspiration or conception'.

Something of this might be seen also with that other major theorist of abstract expressionism, Harold Rosenberg. Rosenberg'southward 'The American Action Painters' was mostly read at the time, for instance by Greenberg, as a mere vulgar reduction of the piece of work of art to action, gesture and the time of its making—and this, of class, is largely the way it is received today. Merely—in, admittedly, a very fine distinction—Rosenberg does in fact open up a certain altitude between the piece of work and its physicality, attributing to it a kind of meaningfulness. He speaks not so much of an 'is' with regard to the work as of a 'seems', which is the essential aspect for the search for meaning, for something behind what is. He characterises the work in terms of 'a drama of equally if', and of the artist playing a certain 'role', with which they are nonetheless to be identified.

If we were to wait for a philosopher of abstruse expressionism, or a philosopher whose work most closely aligns with abstract expressionism—and this would be ironic, in the same way that Henri Bergson is often idea of as the great philosopher of cinema, despite his disapproval of actual films—it would be the American 'ordinary language' philosopher Stanley Cavell. In a series of important essays from the mid-1960s such every bit 'A Matter of Meaning It' and 'Knowing and Acknowledging', Cavell sets out the essential conditions for abstract expressionism (even though, like Bergson, he was not certain that abstract expressionism would laissez passer the test). In 'A Affair of Significant Information technology', Cavell speaks of the style that modernism is characterised by a kind of scepticism, insofar as it ever depends on new or untried conventions. Indeed, if modernism is annihilation, it is the sense that the existing conventions of a item art form no longer apply and new ones must be found. (This is, needless to say, what nosotros take been suggesting is at stake in abstract expressionism.) But this, as Cavell admits, opens modernism up to the possibility of fraudulence, inadvertence and incomprehensibility. How, then, are nosotros to know if what is said in a modernist work of art is meant? Cavell cites the necessity for a sure conviction in the work that allows us to consider what it means in the absence—insofar as it does non still be—of any objective evidence for that pregnant. Information technology is a conviction, that is, that comes before any prove for information technology (simply as Greenberg speaks of an 'inspiration' or 'conception' that comes before 'skill, training or anything else having to do with execution or performance'). As Cavell writes, making the point not that the artist actually intends what nosotros see in the work of fine art, but rather that nosotros must run into such work as intended; that nosotros must attempt to find or locate the intention of the work of art, with which the artist is then (or tin can exist, if it is to exist what Cavell calls a 'serious' piece of work of art) identified: 'The creative person is responsible for everything that appears in his work—not only in the sense that it is done [by them], but in the sense that it is meant'.

Thus, this idea of conviction is not only establish in abstract expressionism, but is the very bailiwick of abstract expressionism. We have the sense that in these works everything is meaningful, everything is intended; that there is always more than to be understood about them. Nonetheless, in that location is no giving upward on the work of art considering nosotros experience that the artist stands somewhere exterior of it, or is only pretending to say what he does. On the contrary, the creative person is absolutely present and part of the piece of work. And to show how these problems play out I would similar briefly to conclude with an creative example discussed by Cavell's bang-up disciple, Michael Fried. Information technology is the work of an artist usually considered a colour field or even a 'physical' or monochrome painter, but whom nosotros might call here an abstract expressionist: the American Joseph Marioni, who makes his work by running a series of subtly dissimilar-coloured layers of pigment down the sail, almost like glazes, at sure points momentarily diverting the flow of pigment past using the end of his paintbrush, his easily or a lamb'southward wool roller. There is a review by Fried of a small Marioni retrospective in the September 1998 issue of Artforum, which forms the ground of the chapter on him in Fried's recent volume Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon, in which he speaks of Marioni as making paintings in the 'fullest and most exalted sense of the word', afterwards what he calls, somewhat slightingly, the 'Minimalist intervention'. In other words, Fried thinks that Marioni does not merely make paintings afterward minimalism, merely somehow catches minimalism up in a wider project (that is, modernist painting), thereby overcoming its scepticism and disbelief and replacing these with conviction and conventionalities. And it is this, amongst other similar developments, that immune Fried to return to criticism later on a 20-year absenteeism with his review of Marioni, insofar equally he believed that his requirement of artistic conviction, which he takes from Cavell, could even so exist institute in the art of today after the irony of mail-modernism.

But what exactly does Fried mean by speaking of Marioni coming after minimalism? In what sense is Marioni able to defeat the scepticism that Fried originally diagnosed in his seminal 1967 essay 'Fine art and Objecthood'? To answer these questions, we might briefly compare Marioni with a painter to whom he is oft related—and, indeed, the ii are friends and colleagues—the minimal, non post-minimal, painter Robert Ryman. Ryman, as is well known, makes works using and most various painterly materials and techniques—frames, canvases, brushes, castor marks, the mounting of the canvas on the wall and and so on—in what can exist seen as an intense meditation on the various properties and procedures of painting. Maybe the best-known text on Ryman is Yve-Alain Bois's 'Ryman's Tact', in which Bois at once repeats and distances himself from this usual, self-reflexive, pseudo-Greenbergian conception of Ryman. He writes: 'An aesthetic of causality is reintroduced [in Ryman's work], a positivist monologue that we thought modern fine art was supposed to have gotten rid of: A (paintbrush) + B (paint) + C (support) + D (the manner in which these are combined) give E (painting). At that place would be nothing left over in the equation. Given E, ABCD could be deciphered, absolutely.'

Just, in fact, Bois refuses to continue with this reading of Ryman, arguing that in the finish in that location is ever something that goes beyond this equation. The Due east in Ryman's piece of work is always in excess of, and cannot just be explained by, A, B, C and D. And in a paradoxical and peradventure deliberately self-contradictory manner, nosotros might fifty-fifty say that information technology is this excess or unknown that Ryman tin can be seen to exist aiming at. That is, at a certain indicate Ryman knows that his method or procedure—and, of course, Ryman's piece of work tin be seen as a course of process art—breaks downward; but information technology is just this failure that he desires. He is not, all the same, able to get to this signal directly; it cannot happen consciously or exist plotted in advance. It is only through Ryman's efforts at command that he can reveal what cannot be controlled. Information technology is but at the end of his painterly procedure that he can expose its limits. It is undoubtedly for this reason that one of the privileged objects of Ryman'south artistic engagement is the artist'due south signature, as in Untitled or For Gertrude Mellon (both 1958). The truth or authenticity of a signature lies in the fact that each is slightly different from the others, that there can exist no direct copying of an original (a straight copying of another signature would, of course, exist a forgery). However, the signatory cannot deliberately gear up out to achieve this difference, merely tin can do so merely through the attempt to really produce another identical signature. Once more, it is for this reason that critics speak of Ryman's work in terms of the philosophical doctrine of pragmatism, for his is an incessant attempt to take into account the limits of cognition, the inability of rules to be definitive. He knows in advance that he tin can never become things entirely right, and he remains content to operate within these limits.

How different all of this is from the work of Marioni. At a certain point in Ryman'south process, in that location is a giving up (not a giving up from the beginning, as in minimalism, just a giving up at the stop). Although he makes work that appears cocky-referential and without remainder, he even so knows in advance that this is incommunicable, and and then his commitment to the project must e'er exist divided. At that place is none of this in Marioni. It might appear that the final consequence of his piece of work is across him. There are physical limits to the medium in which he works (depending on the viscosity of the paint, there are limits as to how much he can change its grade equally information technology runs down the canvas, or to what extent his interventions tin can remain visible; there is a certain physical limit every bit to how large he tin can make his canvases and still have the private droplets hold the surface or remain compositionally pertinent). And however at no indicate does Marioni simply give upward on, or disclaim, his work. Like Pollock, who asserted that at that place were no accidents when he was painting, Marioni is entirely confident that he remains in control of his process. He says, almost wittily, in an interview that he 'controls the painting in his mind' and that his favourite part of the process is 'watching the paint dry in the end', as though in elementary confirmation of a prior cerebral process. In other words, Marioni fully intends—and seeks to make united states feel as fully intended—every aspect of his piece of work. Of class, we do not know exactly what is intended, only that it is intended. Henry Staten, one of Marioni's all-time critics, puts this in a superb aphorism. Paraphrasing the well-known argument about Shakespeare, he writes that Marioni is 'everywhere nowadays, just nowhere visible' in his work. And we might express this every bit the inseparability of the depicted and the literal, and the optical and the cloth, in Marioni'due south oeuvre. Each absolutely is the other. Marioni, we might say, does not so much brand monochromes every bit remake them. The work is perhaps nothing else simply minimalism, just he intends this minimalism. It is exactly in this sense that he tin can exist seen, as Fried asserts, as coming after the 'Minimalist intervention'. He shows that minimalism means nil unless it is meant, and that this meaning it— here he fifty-fifty goes across abstract expressionism—is the very bailiwick of the piece of work.

To conclude here, practice nosotros not see all of the above in T.J. Clark's boggling 'In Defense of Abstract Expressionism', the concluding affiliate of his Bye to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism? Clark begins, in 2001, past albeit that abstract expressionism is not even so distant enough for him properly to speak of information technology. It is as an endeavour to distance information technology—to brand it useful for fine art history—that he describes it (unexpectedly and unconventionally) as 'vulgar', by which he means 'belonging to the desolation of bourgeois gustation' or expressing a 'lilliputian conservative attitude'. Only this 'vulgarity', beyond the work's content or what it represents, is as well a certain grade or way of address. It is vulgar exactly in its lack of irony, its absence of self-distancing (or at least its distancing from the spectator). This is the stardom Clark makes between the piece of work, say, of Gottlieb or De Kooning and that of someone like Asger Jorn, of which Clark wonders whether information technology is ironising its vulgarity or somehow about its vulgarity. The same question might also exist put to George Brecht and his 'fake' Pollocks, or to Robert Rauschenberg's Factum I and 2 (1957), or even to Gerhard Richter'south belatedly abstracts. In a way, all of this piece of work would no longer exist vulgar—and, therefore, no longer useful for art history and having to exist distanced from us—considering it is already its own irony, its ain distancing. Every bit Clark puts it, there is always raised with this 'second generation' of abstract expressionists the question of whether the writer means information technology or non. There is a kind of distance—that constituted by the presence of the artist themselves—between us and the piece of work, rather than the artist beingness in the piece of work, to go back to Rover Thomas and Mark Rothko. Every bit Clark writes:

An Asger Jorn can exist garish, florid, tasteless, forced, beautiful, flatulent, overemphatic; it tin can never be vulgar. It but cannot prevent itself from a tampering and framing of its desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of painting, ironises them, declares them done in full noesis of their emptiness.

Of course, the great strength of Clark's approach—in its immense candour, we might even say its vulgarity—is that he admits that the entire enterprise of art history—its decoding, its interpretation, its symptomatology, ultimately even his own beloved grade analysis—is naught more than an attempt to distance ourselves from the overwhelming presence of the work (such proximity or desire to touch would be the contrary of Ryman'southward 'tact'). It is art history itself, the very book Clark writes, that is the true farewell to modernism. Merely, as Clark admits at the finish of his book, it is non then easy to distance ourselves from art, to ignore its meaningfulness and the unappeasable demands it makes of us. (Over again, this is despite all of the ways in which we—and Clark—are able to analyse, draw and diagnose not only this meaningfulness, merely also the susceptibility of its audience to information technology: the fact that it is social, not primitive; grade-based, non universal; a product of aesthetic training, not innate knowledge.) For Clark admits that there is 1 thing he is unable to distance himself from in the work of the abstract expressionists, which however remains despite all attempts to go rid of information technology: what he calls the 'lyrical', by which he means the 'voice' of the artists themselves. The weep, the primitive cry without words, well-nigh like a song. As he writes: 'I do non believe that modernism tin can ever quite escape [from the lyric]. Past lyric, I hateful the illusion in an art work of a singular voice or viewpoint, uninterrupted, absolute, laying claim to a world of its own.' And, of course, it is this 'lyricism' that I believe Rover Thomas recognised and responded to that mean solar day in the gallery—across cultures, across fourth dimension, across forms. Almost similar that other great doubting, simply still believing, Thomas. He saw in Rothko some other poor 'bugger' just like him. Art history starts with this recognition, and abstract expressionism—and in saying this we have already begun to lose it, it is already beginning to lose itself—reminds us of this fact.

* * *

How then does Aboriginal art allow us to call up about abstract expressionism? In some means, the question is rhetorical. I wished to speak of, Rover Thomas' remarks in front end of the Rothko, of which I wanted to say that he acknowledged meaningfulness without knowing an actual significant. And it is this, I suggest, that we run into today in the best of white critics' responses to Aboriginal art. It is an mental attitude that has increasingly been lost over the previous sixty years of art history, since the end of abstract expressionism, but that the encounter with Aboriginal art is bringing back to us. And, furthermore, I would argue that all of those questions of sincerity, intentionality, the desire to mean, apply too to Ancient fine art today, which we insist is no longer a matter of only following a pre-existing tradition, but of having to work (at least in part) exterior or in consciousness of a tradition, with all of those questions of fraudulence, inadvertence and misattribution that Cavell identifies. Ancient art is contemporary, as it always has been since whites first arrived here, or fifty-fifty, to use Clark's word, 'vulgar'. And this is to say—and this is the salutary affair about studying the reception of Aboriginal art in Commonwealth of australia past white critics—it takes united states of america back, as abstract expressionism intended to exercise, to the first 'archaic' engagement with the piece of work of art: exterior of categories, outside of histories, exterior of protective or distancing ironies or sublimating artful comparisons.

Sometimes this contemporary meaningfulness is recognised by the 'other' side, not merely by critics but too past artists (and there could be no more pressing a chore, which has only partially been attempted, than writing a history not of the art-historical but of the artistic responses to Aboriginal art in Australia). Indeed, soon after delivering an before version of this paper at the Action. Painting. Now symposium, I was reminded by Daniel Thomas of David Smith'south extraordinary welded steel sculpture Australia (1951), now held at MoMA, in remarks he fabricated to the visiting American art historians. Here precisely lies the matching and reciprocal case from Rover Thomas'southward: not an Aboriginal artist recognising something of themselves in abstract expressionism, but an abstruse expressionist recognising something of themselves in Aboriginal art. Every bit Daniel Thomas proposes in 'Aboriginal Art: Who was Interested?', it is likely that Smith get-go encountered actual Aboriginal art in a 1946 exhibition at MoMA entitled Arts of the South Seas, curated past Ralph Linton and Paul Wingert, which featured an ten-ray painting of a kangaroo from Goulburn Island in the Northern Territory. It is this ten-ray style that Smith sought to imitate in Commonwealth of australia, with its thin wavering strips of metal welded on either side of a fundamental bow and a circle above crossed by striated lines. Of course, in one fashion, Smith was ready for Aboriginal art because of his interest, shared by well-nigh, if not all, of the artists in the New York Schoolhouse, in primitivism, surrealism and the unconscious. Simply I want to say more than than this. I want to suggest that, like Thomas in forepart of Rothko, Smith in his work is asking 'Who is that bugger who paints like I sculpt?'

Figure 2. Rover Thomas [Joolama], Kukatja/Wangkajunga peoples, Roads meeting, 1987, natural earth pigments on sail, 90×180 cm, National Gallery of Commonwealth of australia, Canberra. © the artist's estate courtesy Warmun Art Middle.

Effigy 3. Mark Rothko, 1957 # twenty, 1957 oil on sail, 233 × 193 cm. Purchased 1981 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. NGA 1981.729 © Mark Rothko/ARS. Licensed by Viscopy.

Figure 4. David Smith, Australia, 1951, painted steel, 202 × 274 × 41 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of William Rubin, 1533.1968. Digital image: © The Museum of Mod Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © David Smith/ARS. Licensed by Viscopy.

1. Come across, for example, Juan Davila, 'Aboriginality: A Lugubrious Game?', Art & Text 23 (March–May, 1987): 53–8; and Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, 'Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?', Art in America 77 (July 1989): 109–17.

ii. Wally Caruana, 'World of Dreamings: Traditional and Mod Art of Australia', catalogue essay for National Gallery of Australia exhibition at the Hermitage, St Petersburg, February 2000, http://nga.gov.au/Dreaming/Index.cfm?Refrnc=Ch5.

3. See, for example, Michael Boulter, The Art of Utopia: A New Direction in Contemporary Aboriginal Art (Roseville: Craftsman Business firm, 1991), and the essays in Jennifer Isaacs et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings (Roseville: Craftsman Firm, 1998), and Margo Neale, ed., Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere: Paintings from Utopia (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1998).

four. John McPhee, 'Sally Gabori: Feeling the Landscape', Art Monthly Australia 249 (May 2012): 9.

5. Timothy Morton, 'Yukulltji Napangati: Occupying Dreaming', Discipline 2 (Fall 2012): 55.

6. Eric Michaels, 'Western Desert Sandpainting and Postmodernism', in his Bad Aboriginal Fine art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, 1993): 57.

seven. See Vivien Johnson, Michael Jagamara Nelson (Roseville: Craftsman House, 1997), seventy–75.

8. See Imants Tillers, 'Fear of Texture', Art & Text 10 (1983): 8–xviii.

ix. For a summary, meet Elizabeth Burns Coleman, 'Art Fraud and the Ontology of Painting', in Aboriginal Fine art, Identity and Cribbing (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005).

10. This is Ian McLean'southward point in putting together Aboriginal tradition and modernity in 'Aboriginal Modernism?: Two Histories, One Painter', in Margo Neale, ed., Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Canberra: National Museum of Commonwealth of australia Printing, 2008), 24. Extremely interesting in this regard is the Papunya painter Michael Nelson Jagamara, who returned to 'traditional' Aboriginal art after a period of what might be called abstruse expressionism. For a survey of his later career, run across Michael Jagamara Nelson and Imants Tillers et al., The Loaded Ground (Canberra: ANU Drill Hall Gallery, 2012).

11. Barnett Newman, 'The Ideographic Flick', in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill (Berkeley: Academy of California Printing, 1992), 108.

12. Cited in Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Printing, 1993), 69.

13. Irving Sandler, 'The Mythmakers', in The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1976).

14. Ann Gibson, 'Painting through Primitivism', in her Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

xv. Willem de Kooning, 'What Abstract Art Ways to Me', in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross (New York: Abrams, 1990), 36.

16. Newman, 'The Starting time Man was an Creative person', in Barnett Newman, 158.

17. Meyer Schapiro, 'The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art', ArtNews 56, no. 4 (1957); reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 258–69.

18. Newman, 'The Plasmic Image', in Barnett Newman, 140.

19. Radio interview with Rothko and Gottlieb; cited in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),112.

twenty. Newman, 'The Sublime is Now', in Barnett Newman, 173. Michael Leja repeats the statement from Derrida that at once 'no meaning can be determined outside of context' and 'no context permits saturation' (Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 12), and this neatly captures Newman's sense of the sublime. Information technology is neither transcendent (equally in Kant) nor simply objective (as with beauty). It is in many ways Burke's sublime or the very 'struggle betwixt beauty and the sublime' ('The Sublime is Now', 172).

21. Robert Motherwell ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Academy Press, 2d edition, 1981), xliii.

22. Come across, for example, Pollock's 'Argument', Possibilities 1, no. 1 (Winter 1947–48):147; reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 138–xl.

23. 'The Sublime is Now', 173.

24. Robert Motherwell, 'Preface: The School of New York', in his The Writings of Robert Motherwell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 154.

25. Clyfford Still, 'Letter to Gordon Smith', in Abstruse Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 195.

26. Newman, 'Frontiers of Infinite: Interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler', in Barnett Newman, 251.

27. René d'Harnoncourt et al., 'A Statement on Modernistic Art', in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, 232.

28. Max Kozloff, 'American Painting During the Cold War', Artforum 11, no. 9 (May 1973): 42.

29. For a summary, see 'Introduction', 74–79, and David Craven, 'Dissent during the McCarthy Period', in Reading Abstruse Expressionism, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

30. David Smith, David Smith: Sculpture and Writings (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 68.

31. Cited in Becky Hendrick, Getting It: A Guide to Understanding and Appreciating Art (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 7.

32. Michael Fried, 'Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella', in his Fine art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 1998), 224.

33. Michael Fried, 'Optical Allusions', Artforum 37, no. eight (Apr 1999): 97.

34. Henry James, 'The Fine art of Fiction', cited in David Anfam, Abstruse Expressionism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1990), 13.

35. These are chapter titles in Ann Gibson, Abstruse Expressionism: Other Politics, 43–57, Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 17–61, and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subject and Painting in the 1940s, 208–74 respectively.

36. Schapiro, 'The Liberating Quality of Advanced Art', 266.

37. Robert Hughes, American Visions, BBC, 1997, Episode 7. (https://www.youtube.com/picket?v=ZI-BjmNoxdk).

38. Clement Greenberg, 'Afterward Abstruse Expressionism', in The Nerveless Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O'Brien (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 132.

39. Harold Rosenberg, 'The American Activity Painters', ArtNews 51, no. viii (December 1952): 22.

xl. Run into, for example, Stanley Cavell, 'Music Discomposed' in his Must We Hateful What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Printing, 1976): 202–03, where Cavell refuses to decide on the validity—or lack thereof—of a Pollock baste painting or Louis stripe painting.

41. Greenberg, 'After Abstruse Expressionism', 132.

42. 'A Thing of Meaning Information technology', in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 236–7.

43. Michael Fried, 'Joseph Marioni, Rose Fine art Museum, Brandeis University', Artforum 37, no. 1 (September 1998): 149.

44. Michael Fried, 'Fine art and Objecthood', Artforum v, n. x, June 1967, 12–23.

45. Yve-Alain Bois, 'Ryman'southward Tact', in his Painting every bit Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 216.

46. On Ryman'due south link to pragmatism, encounter Suzanne Perling Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge, MA: MIT Printing, 2009).

47. Cited in Ingvild Goetz, 'Written Interview with Joseph Marioni', in Monochromie Geometrie (Munich: Sammlung Goetz, 1996), 66.

48. Henry Staten, 'Painting Beyond Narrative', Kunstforum International 84 (March/April, 1987): 84.

49. See besides Fried's essay 'Thomas Demand's Pacific Sun', in Thomas Demand: Animations, ed. Carrie Schmitz (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 2013), np; in many means Pacific Sun is like a Pollock baste painting or a Carl Andre besprinkle piece, except that its individual elements are deliberately placed or intended,

50. T.J. Clark, 'In Defense of Abstract Expressionism', in his Good day to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Taste (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 388.

51. Clark, 'In Defence force of Abstract Expressionism', 390.

52. Clark, 'In Defence of Abstract Expressionism', 401.

53. Daniel Thomas, 'Aboriginal Art: Who Was Interested?', Journal of Art Historiography 4 (June 2011), http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/daniel-thomas-certificate.pdf. Some other theory has information technology that it was Clement Greenberg who sent Smith some reproductions of 'Ancient cave paintings'; encounter http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/david-smith-sculptures/david-smith-sculptures-room-guide/david-smi-three.

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Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14434318.2014.936529

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