the fate of
a gesture:
jackson pollock
and postwar
american art
by Carter Ratcliff reviewed by
Michael Brennan
Jacket of
The Fate of
a Gesture
Carter Ratcliff
Most Pollock biographies never leave the
barn. They lock the reader in there with a
drunken and belligerent man, spellbound,
swirling around canvas and floor among
open cans of drying Duco on a summer after-
noon. The biographers, and there have been
many, attempt to recreate the intensity and
drama of the studio as depicted in those
famous and spectacular Rudy Burckhardt and
Hans Namuth photographs of Pollock in his
prime. Forget about Cecil Beaton and that
Vogue fashion shoot in front of those major
drip paintings, it's time to smoke cigarettes
with Tony Smith and lay a wet plank down
on top of Blue Poles. Forget Basquiat, that
was an ABC After-School Special compared
to this tale. Hollywood has been casting the
part of Pollock for a while now-- who's it
going to be, Ed Harris or Fred Ward?
Fortunately, Carter Ratcliff's new book
moves beyond all of this. Past the psycho-
piss scenario of the well researched but
misguided (not to mention Pulitzer Prize
winning) Naifeh-Smith biography. Way past
the infamous secondary-source scrapings of
Wall Street Journal critic Deborah Solomon.
Past the trite, lovelorn tales of Ruth Kligman,
the woman who wasn't killed in that fatal car
crash near Fireplace Road. It's an end of the
century--the American Century, a reassessment
of our greatest painter, complete with a coming
MoMA retrospective, and even art historian
T.J. Clark is having another look. We have
finally reached the point where the myth is
meaningless, like the Cedar Tavern: still here
but long gone. We can now really look at the
paintings, examine their legacy and draw new
conclusions. Which is exactly what Ratcliff
has done in his new and insightful survey,
The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and
Postwar American Painting.
Ratcliff, who has written so thoughtfully
on art, particularly on abstract painting,
demonstrates that Pollock was no accidental
genius. Art biographers have typically
characterized painters as surly misfits
with crackpot pretensions, undisciplined
buffoons who stumble their way into
history. Ratcliff carefully examines the full
impact of Pollock's art, separating his
character from his contribution. Did Pollock
effect the way people behave? Did Pollock
effect the way people paint? As Ratcliff
demonstrates, Pollock did influence the
way art is made, and in ways much deeper
than any kind of imitative drip technique
associated with his personal style of painting.
Pollock influenced the way artists thought
about art, beginning with his own infamous
retort, "I am nature," and extending through
to the critical writing of someone like Donald
Judd, whose radical interpretation of Pollock's
painting in his 1967 Arts Magazine article on
Pollock reflected his generation's spin on both
material and metaphor.
Ratcliff's argument, which is consistent with
many of the themes propagated by MoMA curator
Kirk Varnedoe and other contemporary scholars,
is that Pollock has had singular and widespread
influence among artists as varied as Robert
Smithson, Lynda Benglis and Richard Serra.
Ratcliff's thesis seems to be that most of the
familiar postwar American art figures are
reacting to a specifically broad and searching
gesture and an imaginary approximation of
scale--in the cultural sense, and either
adopting that attitude outright and applying
to their own set of issues (Morris Louis,
Walter De Maria) or transforming it in a
paradigm shift (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol)
or merely aping or appropriating its perceived
glamour for cinematic/celebrity value (Robert
Longo, Julian Schnabel).
The title of the book might imply that
this chain of bastardization is a process
of depletement. But everyone has their own
Pollock to wrestle with, and we all inhabit
a separate America. Ratcliff outlines a path
in postwar American art that begins with a
sense of the heroic sublime, which then
becomes saddled with an idea of the
entropic sublime, and ultimately is fixed
with endlessly inventive and recurring
commercial sublime. Ratcliff is most lucid
on this point when articulating exactly what
took place with "the gesture" in the time span
between Jackson Pollock's Scent of 1955 and
Jasper Johns' Scent of 1973-74. How quickly
did we go from "I am Nature" to "I am Culture?"
Ratcliff succinctly leads us from a `50s clique
of artists, misunderstood Melvillian "isolatoes,"
snubbed by Cahiers d'Art, to the professional
artist of today, who can seem overshadowed by
a celebrity-consumer culture valorized in the
pages of Artforum as well as in the mass media.
Most of the biographical material in
Ratcliff's book recalls fairly well known
information, but his larger idea regarding
Pollock's gesture and its seemingly
endless reincarnation raises timely and
important questions with respect to the
character of postwar American art. Like
Smithson's Spiral Jetty, these issues
continually submerge only to resurface.
Ratcliff's well written and sweeping
survey adroitly illuminates an era--one
that now may be ending. The Fate of a
Gesture is approachable art history at its
best, in the manner of Calvin Tomkins' Off
the Wall, and it should be required
reading along with Jeffrey Potter's To A
Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of
Jackson Pollock for anyone interested in
the subject.
MICHAEL BRENNAN is a New York painter who
writes on art.
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