The Drip Goes To China. “Rising” at 34 on Long.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
One of my favourite moments from the whole of art history is when Andy Warhol said “Do I have to do drips?”, thereby sweeping High Modernism into oblivion at one stroke, and sending Mark Rothko, who was religious about his drips, into a such a tailspin that he cut himself up and bled to death on his kitchen floor. More drips.
Not that Mark Rothko's hadn't alreadly had a few drip problems of his own. He suffered from impotence, which one can understand being a problem for any reasonably sensitive man living through High Modernism, as it was also High Freudianism, and the primary (sexual) drip was so deeply conflated with the secondary (painterly) drip that even a tap would be afraid it wasn't drippy enough.
After that the only thing that dripped for the next forty years or so was sarcasm, which is how long it took for High Modernism to start looking as funny to everyone else as it did to the Pop artists, and then the miraculous discovery was made that the drip could be sarcasm itself. Not just the pop-art drip, but the actual wet runny post-High Modernist drip.
And so emerged the current Era of Drippism, which is now at its Height. The drip is very interesting, because it signifies High Modernist emotion as a joke. Georgina Gratrix pointed this out brilliantly in her Drip Painting, which is a big painting full of long, long drips that each have a head with goggly eyes. Hello, Drips! And yet drips also signify real emotion, or trauma, or 'the real'. The real wet drip is a post-machine-age little message to the Pop artists that even though we would all love to be cool machines we really aren't.
Charles Saatchi's latest It Girl, Stella Vine, has so many drips that it looks like Charles probably picked her out by counting drips and she had the most. She also has an almost-real, fake-traumatic past as a sex worker, which started a whole chain of shouting that it's the 'confessional' drippiness of her real life that she's been chosen for, and not her painting which is crap (a bit like that other slag Tracey Emin, they yell). Here I think the shouters have a point: her painting is crap. Which is the problem with painting, in that unfortunately being able to make a good painting isn't helped at all by having real emotional trauma, or even by being a real drip. It's about knowing how to use that stuff. It's still artifice, same as it ever was, even though the High Modernists believed for a moment that it was real.
But the idea that art shouldn't be about whingeingly abject confession seems outdated somehow, like a Victorian throwback. Why not whinge? We're so BORED with being cool machines. We still have feelings, even though we mock them and we know they're not of the heroic order of High Masculinism. We also have sad things like child abuse (Penny Siopis) and the painful emotional risks of teen sex (Lisa Brice). We have these all over the world, even where Late Capitalist society runs smoothly like a cool machine. And then we have the places in the world, like the one we live in, where society does not run like a cool machine. Drip drip drip go the real blood and the tears that haven't even heard of High Modernism.
Which brings us to Mainland China, which has a history of emotional trauma on a scale of that defies comprehension. Now China is “Rising”, as the title of the show at 34 on Long implies, and one of the signs of this is that Chinese painting is bringing in big money. While there is interesting work to be found amongst the vast tsunami of new Chinese painting, there is also a whole lot of really cliched rehashing that comes across as tourist art with a Cultural Revolution theme. A kind of painted Chinese version of Che Guevara T-shirts. And a lot of this work is absolutely covered in drips: the global village signifier of painterly trauma.
It's at moments like this that Western cultural imperialism strikes me as the most cruel. Because it puts pressure on all cultures to demonstrate their modernity and sophistication in Western terms. And so these Chinese painters who are painting about seriously traumatic stuff try to make themselves look hip and contemporary by engaging in Drippism, which actually looks more convincing when coupled with the fake trauma of silly Stella Vine, even though her painting is easily as lousy as theirs. Why is this? Because the drips, like all contemporary art, are inextricably embedded in Western art history, which masquerades as a global language but actually generates huge imbalances. These imbalances are made painfully visible when it comes to the expression of non-Western realities like non-fake large-scale social trauma that will never be a funny pretention like High Modernist drips.
Labels: painting
posted by Vince Condesini at 9:42 PM
13 Comments:
Some good writing here.
Nice to find you.
TJ (http://www.tjnorris.net/blog)
Read up on Rothko will you please. Pretentious writing you mean tj, what bullshit.
Well seeing as neither of us actually knew him, the problem seems to be that the fictional account of him that I've read is different from the fictional account you've read.
By reading up, i mean read the works, look at it. Of course your account of his dying on the kitchen floor...drips etcetera..is bull, but a lot in the article is, nothing wrong with that, you don't pretend different. My problem, or lets rephrase; my curiosity, is to why you would use Rothko as an example of drips? So either you just blurt out something that sounds vaguely like 'modernism; Rothko' without knowing his work, or you know and have seen something I don't know about?
Well, at least someone in this town is grappling with painting theory in an intelligent and interesting way.
I used the example of Rothko because I read (I think it was in Hal Foster's "Return of the Real") that the intensification of Rothko's depression that led to his suicide had a lot to do with Andy Warhol. Warhol was the personification of Rothko's sense that everything he cared about was going to the dogs. He hated Warhol so much that he would cross the street to avoid walking anywhere near him.
It seems that different sources attribute his death to different things. Depression is also cited, and so is the fact that his wife had left him, apparently on account of his impotence. But the theory that it had to do with Warhol in particular is not mine alone.
So I chose that death rather than Pollock's because I think Pollock died for reasons that had practically nothing to do with Pop Art. I think it was the market and Clement Greenberg that killed him rather than intellectual ideas, which are what I'm interested in here.
And also I don't see Pollock as having the religious seriousness of Rothko. He didn't fill a chapel with abstract paintings for spiritual contemplation. So even though Pollock is remembered the most, and even though he believed in his drips a great deal, I think Rothko took it all to heart in a way which makes him a poignant figure of the lucicrous levels of earnest sincerity and religiosity with which that generation believed in what they were doing. (And he did also make drips, even though they occured as a result of brush strokes. But in some ways, if you think of the Lichtenstein brush stroke, Rothko's work is in a sense more iconic than Pollock's).
But I did refer to Pollock, I think fairly directly, in the description of the Freudian interpretation of drips. He may have been less spiritual, but I think his physical self and sexuality are generally agreed to have been involved. His statement which I love almost as much as Warhol's one on the drips is "I don't paint nature, I am nature". When I think of that I just want to piss myself... more drips!
yeah but whose drips make the bigger splash, pisspot's worth?
I agree completely. Writing about a famous person on a blog when they've been dead for decades is a direct indication that you think you're more famous than they are.
I made a painting with drips that go up. its a nude.
Good work, Jake! That's the spirit!
Dear anonymous 12.32,
I was wondering - if I was famous for writing about someone not famous, some living unknown person.... or if I was dead and achieved fame by writing, posthumously, about sone living one, why don't I understand any of this?
or if Jake was White??????
Does the sun still shine or is it a Lunar Cloud that seeps in the window destroying the curtains and rotting the
what the f. is a "lanar cleavage"?
it is what weeps in yonder window...
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home