The Mood of the Matter

The Aesthetic Emotion at the Heart of Modernism

Page II

Thus, the induction of the exceptional state of mind is for the sake of altering us to a purpose, of changing our perceptual capacity such that we can “see” beyond the range and specifications of normative perception, such that we can “see” beyond the veil of appearances—such that we can see the truth, spontaneously realized. It is evident at this point that a distinction is best made between emotion and mood, for we must consider that two different capabilities are under consideration here. What Mallarmé sought to raise through the influence of his notoriously obscure poetic technique is something other than a component of ordinary emotional experience—it is something other than ordinary in any possible sense. He looked to a revelatory state of mind, and we may reserve the word “mood” for that—the term surely was employed by Yeats for similar purpose. It then becomes clear that what Eliot valued was emotions, artistically encapsulated—in a sense, he saw the poet as the documentarian of human emotive existence. The “state” of mind for Valéry, who was something of a devotee of Mallarmé and Mallarmé’s Symbolist aesthetic, is more akin to the art of the sorcerer. What he is after is a different quality of “vision.” And it is best to assign the “aesthetic emotion,” despite Eliot’s use for his purposes of the similar phrase, to the designation of mood, to the overarching aura of the artistic frame of dreaming.

This is the essence of Modernism, this search for an insight into a truth that evades the ordinary mind, this hunt for the quarry of truth that eludes the hounds of rational pursuit. The game is a species of the sublime, and it is the soul of the endeavor of every major abstract visual artist from Kandinsky to Pollock and beyond. The purpose of the project of abstraction—or Modernist abstract art, or abstract painting that had not demoted itself to the stable of formalism—is to create an artistic mood, to purify and induce the aesthetic feeling, so as to trigger the spontaneous realization of the truth of things, so as to alter the mind’s eye, so as to see as we are otherwise incapable of seeing—so as to unchain the potencies of the mind that have been shackled to the normative vision of the real.

Sontag once characterized the modern artist as a broker in madness, and the attribution holds if we view such artistic madness as the poise it appears to possess from the point of view of ordinary thought, if we take the departure from the normal and move doggedly into the truth as if “mad.”

In short, this is Kant—the aesthetic mind as capable of conceiving what breaks the norms of the rational, as penetrating more deeply than the limits of reason permit, as able to know comparatives that result of no standard computational comparisons, as powered to recognize the absolutely great. As sublime; as unchained. And it is not very different from Nietzsche, if we take the Dionysian, in its version as a state of mind, as possessing a special status, as in some sense more exalted than the Apollinian state—as revealing something of truth. The distinctions between the aesthetics of Kant and of Nietzsche, the differences between them regarding the value and the function of art, are finally in the details. The details are imperative, they speak of conceptions of art and of reality that differ profoundly, but there is a family resemblance in these aesthetic philosophies that must not be ignored. In broad terms, the essential point is the same, and the manner in which philosophical positions arrange themselves when seen in a distant overview is as important as the intricate examinations of the differences of detail, even if academic careers generally are not made by observing broad alignments and discrepancies, for they tell us the large questions we are entertaining, and what, in the gravest sense, is at stake. It is imperative that we know how our positions line up. In Kant and Nietzsche, and in Schopenhauer and many others, there is announced the death of the credibility of the quotidian, of the plainly self-presented, and there is claimed special powers of accuracy for aesthetic perception. Much of the modern world essays from this position. The differences regarding what is to be found in the artistic vision is in the end of small importance because there is no saying it, no recounting it, no bringing it back for those who have not made the aesthetic excursion. It is available only through the actual artistic product, and thus what we really have is a wall Kant builds against himself; Also Sprach Zarathustra, the philosophical work of literary art; and the body of Modernist art that has sprung from this soil, or from thoughts similar that were nourished by underground tributaries of purely artistic origin.

Of course, something must be said—in relation to Kant, who is being offered as providing the foundation of Modernism generally and of abstraction specifically—regarding the shift in this argument from the beautiful to the sublime. It can be claimed that abstraction in art bypasses the beautiful, in Kant’s sense of it, and directs the aesthetic interest immediately to the sublime. The prepossessing quality of the image—the hypnotic aspect, the impeccability of its presentation—is not in its pleasure, universal to the judgment or otherwise, but in its provocation of the sense of sublimity, become possible precisely because nature is not represented.

. . . whereas natural beauty (such as is self-subsisting) conveys a finality in its form making the object appear, as it were, preadapted to our power of judgement, so that it thus forms of itself an object of our delight, that which, without our indulging in any refinements of thought, but, simply in our apprehension of it, excites the feeling of the sublime, may appear, indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account. (The Critique of Judgement, trans. Meredith, § 23)

Not capable of an envisioning in nature, in the given availabilities of form, the sublime is a function—like the abstract composition whose principles of departure from nature is necessarily not derivable from nature—of purely mental formulations, of powers capable only to thought.

For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit of sensuous presentation. Thus the broad ocean agitated by storms cannot be called sublime. Its aspect is horrible, and one must have stored one’s mind in advance with a rich stock of ideas, if such an intuition is to raise it to the pitch of a feeling which is itself sublime—sublime because the mind has been incited to abandon sensibility and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality.

That quality of finality available only to the mind threatens not only to defy observation in nature but to elude visual organization in the work of art, corresponding potentially and in aesthetic ambition to the difficulty of founding or finding comprehensive laws for abstract composition. The correspondence to the sublime may evade all visual encapsulation, whether natural or devised—it may be essentially non-visual.

But in what we are wont to call sublime in nature there is such an absence of anything leading to particular objective principles and corresponding forms of nature that it is rather in its chaos, or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation, provided it gives signs of magnitude and power, that nature chiefly excites the ideas of the sublime.

The suggestion of Pollock here is self-evident and inescapable, as well as the necessity of resorting not to the visual encapsulation but to the evocative mood.

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(Kant’s specification of a “finality,” of a completeness of form, of a self-contained and self-accomplished quality, that is to be discovered in the mind but not in nature, if extended to the possibility of a finality not to be visualizable in any manner, implies a correspondence to higher geometry, in which structures that can be described with precision trigonometrically cannot be visualized, even to the mind’s eye, i.e., multidimensional forms, such as a Hypertorus or Hypersphere: “Hence it gives a veritable extension, not, of course, to our knowledge of objects of nature, but to our conception of nature itself—nature as mere mechanism being enlarged to the conception of nature as art—an extension inviting profound inquiries as to the possibility of such a form.” Nature defined as the mechanism of form itself, as the possibility of form, extended—structural coherence beyond the capability of the senses seen as the substance of the sublime. However, this line of thought is necessarily the subject for another and more extensive inquiry.)

And so, the stream of Abstract Expressionism reputedly dedicated to the spontaneous emotional expression of the artist, the current of the “Action Painters,” may be about something more than mere sincerity of inner reaction and personal attitude. It may be comparable to the other branch of the mode in its intrinsic ambition, to the more geometric manner of such as Rothko and Newman that pursues the insight of the sublime through mathematical regularities, that pursues an honesty and not a sincerity, that chases after a truth-telling. It may be so, but the determination is difficult if not impossible, for as the realization sought is inherently unspeakable, it is unspeakable even to ourselves. With regard to the sublime, we cannot be certain of what we are looking to see or if we are seeing what qualifies as the accomplishment. What we typically have done is attempt to recognize the sublime by feel, to attribute an insight upon feeling awestruck by the work of art, and there remains perpetually the risk of “reading into” the work, of convincing ourselves we feel the presence of the awesome revelation and then attaching that feeling to the work, claiming the feeling an objective attribute of the art, of intruding ourselves into the art rather than observing with full critical-mindedness what is before us—of talking ourselves into it. As viewers of abstract visual art, we are doomed to working blind.

The question, in short and in each case of abstraction, is—does the artist get there? In Pollock’s case, with the mature works, with the drip paintings, it is Greenberg’s notifications that give us the option. The netting of line work that establishes the beginnings of the perception of depth, the faceting of the surface that arranges repetition tactics to organize the visual presentation, the carefully accomplished compositional strategies, demonstrate the presence of a methodology for achieving an orchestrated effect, a means for reaching past the limits of an unthinking commission of reactive gesturing—for getting somewhere, somewhere of aesthetic deliberateness. As compositional structures, they are, and they are of course, geometric, and they relate Pollock’s apparently spontaneous paintings to the clearly more cautious works of geometric Abstract Expressionism, demonstrating Pollock’s works to be variations of the same mode. But these technical factors indicate mere possibilities of achievement, means that, as Greenberg once observed, do not guarantee an end, and we remain with the question: what precisely are we seeing?

And there is no settling the question, for we would have to know the sublime to know if we are seeing the sublime in Pollock’s paintings, and the unsettling result is that abstract art remains a matter of faith—and faith is not an intellectual stance. But there are determinations, modest ones, we can make. With Pollock, we know there are claims by mathematicians that fractal patterns have been located in his paintings. Richard P. Taylor, Adam P. Micolich, and David Jonas presented their findings in Nature (see Nature, vol. 399, 3 June 1999), and they observed that the fractal dimensions increased over time as Pollock refined his drip technique, demonstrating a deliberateness to the application of the technique and showing, in their words, “the fingerprint of nature.” The aesthetic question then becomes whether we are seeing the “fingerprint” of something more than nature observed, whether we are seeing the fingerprint of the truth of nature—of nature in itself, beyond normative perception.

The findings support and cement Greenberg’s claims about the care and intricacy of the compositional strategies, as well as the alignment with the more easily recognized geometric manners of other Abstract Expressionists. In short, the apparent difference in manner between Pollock and Rothko, say, may be a matter of nothing more than sophistication of geometric technique, as if that were nearly nothing. But the question of ultimate significances is not answered in this—the fractal patterns still are only aspects of the works, facial features of the paintings. Nevertheless, we can now begin to infer on the basis of the hypothetical, for cogent thought is always promising.

If it were to be the case that Pollock’s works induce the mood of spontaneous realization—that they are not spontaneous renderings but carefully wrought works for triggering spontaneous insight—if Pollock does raise the intuitive grasp into consciousness, does his mathematics participate in the process? Even assuming the efficacy, we cannot be sure the math would be the active agent, but inferences can be drawn from the further assumption, from the “what if,” from the construction done from the other end. If the math were to be proved participative in the insight, if the intuition were demonstrated to be triggered by a confrontation with geometric structure, made conscious by a conscious engagement with geometric formulation, then it would follow that the intuition is itself geometrically structured—that geometry is intuitive. For a system to be relatable to another system, the systems must be systematically similar, they must be of a piece structurally, the principles of organization must bear a resemblance—the systems must be capable of integration. Further, art is the providing of the vicarious experience—it is the sensory presentation of the “what if”—and thus Pollock’s fractal patterns must be “digestible” by the imagination and, if capable of intrusion into and invocation of the intuition, they must be “digestible” there, as well.

Although art can be made with fractal patterns, fractals, as well as geometric figures of any disposition, do not in themselves make a work of art. The unadorned Golden Ratio is merely the Golden Ratio. If it were the case that Pollock takes us “there” and does so by means of his complex geometries, he could do so only by envisioning fractal structures within an artistic imaginative expanse, only by combining awareness of geometry with the artistic emotion, with and within the aesthetic mood. That mood is dependent upon artistic means, it would be rendered artistic by being rendered artistically, and the capability factor here would be the handmade quality, the “painting” quality—the quality of the atelier, the haptic component, in which the aspect of the hand, heightened through the honing and control of craft, would ramp up the density of the encoded data, would enrich the work, and transform the compositional elements into experiential qualities, as if environmental for the imagination. The hand, through its inescapable tracking of unconscious impulse—through its orchestration of its intricately committed gestures, through its recording and coordinating of its variations of movement—intrudes more information into the work than ever could be installed deliberately, infuses the work with the tempo as well as the temper of the unconscious, whence most of those commitments arise, and the geometrical, compositional elements of the work become instilled with the directions and the deliberations of the intuition, and are capable of serving as the trigger for the realization of the intuitional content—potentially.

At this juncture, a potentiality is what it all must remain, for dealing with the sublime has this difficulty intrinsically. The sublime stands at the frontier of consciousness, charting the territory between the conscious and the unconscious minds, and resides entirely upon the possibility that we know something more in our unconscious “state” than we do in full consciousness. And therein is the problem. If we were to dredge the depths of what we know without knowing it, we might well by the transposition distort beyond authenticity the very knowledge we are attempting, and if the truth of things has no relation to our unconscious awareness, if the unconscious mind is the habitat of pure fantasy, then the entire enterprise is hopeless, and we might have no capability for recognizing that fact. Worse still, the very phrase “unconscious awareness” might be of necessity a contradiction in terms, in which case we are chasing a chimera, and art is merely a pleasurable state of mind, and a self-hypnosis.

But it is all a matter of faith, and to take the faith as lightly as we can, to take it as promising only the credible and coherent possibility that art may open our better mind, the mental realm in which we realize more than we typically know, we must acknowledge the fact that Modernism generally, and Pollock as one of its most salient examples, presents nearly insuperable challenges to confirmation. But in that we ought to recognize that Modernism, the great artistic innovation of the last century, has left us with one of the great challenges to aesthetic thought, and it is ours to take up the challenge, one that will be faced only when we find a method to discover to ourselves what, if anything, Modernist Art has discovered.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2006)

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