Art Criticism - The State University of New York

6. KEEPING ONE'S DISTANCE FROM PAINTING'S UNCERTAINfY
PRINCIPLE
When a painter, trained in copying reproduces directly from the natural observed
world in front of him something that looks completely non-objective,
without a hint of any familiar object-an arbitrary design in a snowbank, a cliff,
a cloud, he is paying a tributes not always consciously, to those who got this
effect by pure invention. Both were so busy throwing out the furniture of the
past that they had no energy to invent new forms of any memorability or to
adapt from those forms mourning in art's junkyard. What is so disturbing or
hard to understand in the decorative flux they achieved? Only in that painting
that hybridizes the natural with the mind's phantoms is there danger and adventure.
(Dati speaks of the abstract ennui.) What I have tried to do was the
opposite of this non-objective purification, fleshing out amorphous half-forms
in a landscape or room perspective, trying to give these shy wraiths a local
habitation and a name.
If abstract expressionism is looked at with scientific eyes it might
seem a natural panicking reaction to recent disturbing discoveries: the uncertainty
principle in physics, fusion instability, anti-matter, immunization of disease
microbes, the kind of form breakup that would logically occur in an atomized
society. But from a religious viewpoint it seems too earthbound, too easy
a reaction to the physical superficiality of these threats, not concrete and
tangible enough in its solipsistic symbolism to be of comfort to one in spiritual
distress who doesn't want to be merely delighted or distracted. The very
verticality and hush of a museum wall exaggerates the monumentality and
sacredness of a picture we would find merely curious in a book. Veneration of
graffiti hallows frail insights with an esthetic uncertainty principle.
One of his discarded paintings can help to finish another for the
painter hesitant to bring anything to completion for fear he may go too far and
jeopardize any shaky identity the picture may have. With no familiar landmarks
to help, some artists get to love the battle too much to be able to clarify the
painting beneath the pocked, scarred ground. This sacrifice of meaning on the
part of abstract expressionist pioneers inspired their followers more than did
their more legible key works that the public remembers. In the hard-to-capture,
penultimate state of these rudderless records of self-search, there might be
found a fresh gesture set down and, in exhaustion, left alone. This is the
opposite of the easy grace of unembattled one-shot serendipity.
To pacify outrageous fortune with a sanctioned serenity (as Anton
vol. 17, no. 1 23