Now “automatic writing,” even after a period of growing familiarity with surrealist theoretics, would have remained the most intractable aspect of surrealist methodology for Americans. American artists in general were simply too uptight by nature to lose themselves in automatist trances, or to place much faith in the results of them even if they could. Nevertheless, at the heart of automatism there lay an extremely attractive proposition: it was that the artist was not responsible for the legibility of depictions. The artist could, perhaps even should, produce images he did not understand, perhaps not even see, without obligation to explain or account for them. The reason, of course, was the surrealist faith in the universal validity of subconscious forms, but regardless of the attitude of any given artist about the subconscious as a repository of meaningful forms – Pollock’s was respectful, Gorky’s contemptuous – the idea that the artist was not responsible for the immediate meaning of his work proved to be not only a liberating one, but one which would, in fact, make each member of the School of New York owe something of his future greatness to surrealism. Even the critic Clement Greenberg, who had consistently argued with more clarity than anyone else for how little surrealism really had to offer in overcoming the genuine difficulties of the times, had to acknowledge the value to artists of the reliance upon the unconscious and the accidental” in serving “to lift inhibitions.” Thus an imagery came into being which was, in a sense, not depiction at all, and with it the Americans were able to reconcile their need to engage the “modernism” of the mythical method with their equally powerful need to investigate the nondepictive legacy bequeathed them by the artists they most admired. It was a transitional solution, of course, but it managed to stave off -- and then some – the paralysis threatened by confronting too soon the exclusionary logic of abstract art.” -- Philip Leider “Surrealist and Not Surrealist In the Art of Jackson Pollock and His Contemporaries” in The Intepretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Impressionism page 44.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:08:48 +0000