Art Criticism - The State University of New York

and many of whom were born in Europe) but this was a surrealism that did not
use unsettling perspective and provided a shock more genial than cauterizing.
A resolutely non-human, disdainful high comedy of inexorable
Turneresque nature was slated to replace the world-weary, all too human nihilism
of the art-mockers. These "mad-vets" were not craftsmen in clean denims,
for they wanted to get away from the image of the artist as a person who takes
infinite pains. Their one important pain was a sense of having to make up for
lost time and they trained themselves fast, teaching each other more than they
learned from their unbaptized instructors on the GI Bill. Proudly tattered beer
drinkers with half-revealed war sagas, few became total alcoholics or were
incurably sexually lonely. Few were known to record in writing their barroom
ideas and were politely silent if one among them embarrassed the others by
publishing words. Their ambitious preoccupation was too subtle, too big for
descriptions. Here was painting (often boring or chaotic) which came from the
noble Whitmanesque largesse that fed the young writers like 1. Kerouac, flawed
with a windy, rough-hf'.wn American gaucherie, but being often above vengeance
and subtle deceits. This time of postwar grace, of loafing and inviting
one's soul, was inchoate in the sense of rising out of, not sinking into chaos.
As it defined and preened itself it lost members who never had thought of it as
a real school, but even to them it remained a moral presence.
Politically, most of this group was Leftist, but friends from the Right
were agreed with in tileir denunciations of decadence, cleverness, facility.
Perhaps there was a bit of stoic masochism in their vow to complete a painting
in one standing (hard to prove and not a new idea since it goes back to Whistler
and the Impressionists). In their lunging paint slings, would they have
admitted that dance was necessary to their complete involvement in this almost
exorcizing ritual of physicality? Not to the extent that some Europeans
would later film themselves in the act of painting. And the sloppiness and
dripping or impastoing to a new depth I'm sure was seen as an unselfconsciously
rapt byproduct of excitement, like the "dirty" instrumental timbre of the cherished
old jazz music, liquor-fueled, that had not yet been ousted by the new
coolness of marijuana's progressive jazz and "pop" art.
There was little self parody. One artist, after squeezing out a tube of
paint onto a painting, left the empty tube embedded in the paint; but, like the
tube caps that appear in Pollock's work, this could be smiled at as the result of
carelessness or preoccupation. When the canvas was sclerotic they might
have rationalized "Sacre du Printemps." Could one make a comparison between
these random dislocations and shatterings and "speaking in tongues",
the religious glossal alia that, since before St. Paul's time, has been useful in
freeing a worshipping mind for prayer? On this non-objective level, to introduce
recognizable sounds (as in "Finnegan's Wake") would be as dissonant
as bringing recognizable forms into these paintings. For the kind of rich, sub-
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Art Criticism