by Dr Jim Walsh, CEO of Conway Hall
Now this is going to be difficult…
Essentially, what follows will be an argument for the limitation of words in our lives… The irony of this statement and task is not lost on me.
Recently, I have been exploring the world of DIY and restoration projects on YouTube. What has struck me is how relaxing I have found videos where there is no presenter or narrator. The ones that attract me have minimal or non-existent explanation, text, or close-ups of someone’s face talking to the camera. Instead, the focus is on the subject in hand, the project being undertaken. The absence of the spoken or written word is thoroughly refreshing and allows space for me to genuinely engage with the work that is being shown. This is new to me in the realm of video/TV/film and I am quite surprised by it. My surprise, however, is weighted by a sense of familiarity.
Listening to music offers this opportunity of engagement. Whether it is classical, rock, blues, trance or dance etc., music gives us that space. Interestingly, so does art, particularly some forms of abstract art.
The abstract art I specifically mean is that which gets classified as Abstract Expressionism – the likes of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. All three of these artists at one point or another did something very radical with their art beyond the style of the paintings themselves. They each took to eliminating titles and began to refer to their works by a simple code such as Still’s 1957-D No.1. Or, Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950. Or, Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow and Blue) (1954). The idea was that, and please note that I’m grossly over-simplifying and lumping three very different artists together, their works need to stand on their own visual merit and not be drawn into literary narratives. They wanted to get past the need by others to have a descriptive hook with which to approach their work. In particular the surrealist vogue, encouraged by André Breton (Surrealism’s leader, visionary, co-founder, and manifesto writer), was something to overcome and ignore for Still, Rothko and Pollock. One has only to think of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory or Max Ernst’s Oedipus Rex to consider the movement that captured the world’s imagination and went before Abstract Expressionism.
The key question really becomes why did Clyfford Still and Co. move away from titles. Rothko used to say (and be torn by having to say it) that silence is so accurate, meaning that the best way to engage with his work was to do so visually and not through language, speech or interpretation. Still went one further.
Following up an enquiry given to him by his then gallerist, Peggy Guggenheim, Still invited both Guggenheim and Breton to his home to view 1944-N, No.2. As Still records in his diary and the story goes, Breton was at a loss as to how to view, engage with, or understand the work. Subsequently, because Guggenheim offered to translate/interpret between the artist and visionary she suggested to Still that she was at fault in not being a sufficiently adroit interpreter because Breton was more intellectual than she. Still didn’t mince his words when he recorded:
“Her apology and his confusion seemed to express the point so well. The intellectual was confused; the one who could see the pictures was not. Without a dialectic and a set of verbs Breton was lost.”*
Still obviously relished the challenge that he had thrown down to Breton.
The point of eliminating of titles, of course, was to get the spectator to engage with the work and not anything else. Still, and latterly Rothko, was at pains to prevent anything from getting in the way of the work’s relationship with a genuine spectator. So much so he removed, as did the others, all symbols, allusions, representation and figuring in his work. No footholds, linguistic anchors or tantalising glimpses of meaning were ever given. Even the artists’ biographies were battened down as much as possible. Everything that might enable an art critic to wax lyrical was eviscerated, until only the paint on canvas remained.
No distractions were tolerated. Only the work mattered. Words, concepts, ideas all fell to the ground, crushed along with pre-conceptions, speculation, and hyperbole. Points of view, arguments, and insistence upon knowing the true meaning had to give way to another kind of looking at art. Against the grain of the whole of Western civilisation, words mattered nought and only the visual was left. Those who first saw the vast canvases by Still, Rothko and Pollock had to just stare at them. They could only look. Trying to discern meaning was rendered meaningless.
The three artists, along with their peers, wanted people to see their art, not read or listen, but see. Their work was in a visual medium and they started to demand that that was how it should be engaged with. Words, critics, narrators, historians, curators, agents, gallerists – the whole art-world was summarily rejected in favour of the genuine spectator who wanted to look at the work.
There is ethics at play here because respect and trust are prioritised rather than a hierarchy of knowledge. Indeed, ethics can go further because equity is provided as no one’s learning, privilege, or ability can manoeuvre above anyone else’s. We all become equal, as well as being liberated, when given the space to just look.
This is what I found familiar in my recent travels into YouTube. A stripping away of all the surrounding paraphernalia of explanation, clutter and hierarchy to reveal the purity of the subject being made or restored. It really is quite amazing how little we need words at times and what we might gain by their removal.
As I mentioned, the irony is duly noted.
*Patricia Still, ‘Clyfford Still: Biography’, in Thomas Kellein (ed.), Clyfford Still 1904–1980: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections.