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Abstract Expressionism and the body: Philosophical and cultural interpretations
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Abstract Expressionism and the body: Philosophical and cultural interpretations
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Abstract Expressionism and the body: Philosophical and cultural interpretations
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Dissertation
Abstract Expressionism and the body: Philosophical and cultural interpretations
1998
Overview
This dissertation examines the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, investigating how the body is represented and how philosophical understandings of the body are embedded in the art. A new emphasis on the role and meaning of the body is evident in the subject matter, style, aesthetic values, and techniques of these artists. The oeuvre of each artist is analyzed to determine how it embodies a distinctive set of concerns related to the body. As manifested in Abstract Expressionism, the body is present in numerous and diverse ways ranging from a slightly more representational form to an abstracted bodily presence. Whether overt, covert, veiled, or dispersed, the body is a continual theme in Abstract Expressionism, suggesting that it was being given new status on many levels as a viable and meaningful aspect of human experience. In this project, the body is a term indicating diverse and expanded philosophical meanings. The body in Abstract Expressionism is analyzed in the following ways: (1) as a figural form, (2) the presence of the artist's body invested in the canvas as traces of movement and dispersed bodily force which often substitute for the figure, (3) the role of the artist's body during the painting process, and (4) the intense focus on viewer participation as an active aesthetic experience emphasizing the role of the spectator's body in relation to the canvas. At the core of the spontaneous gesture and the enveloping field of color is a new attitude expressing the inherent wisdom of the body as a carrier of knowledge--not associated with knowledge as reason but with feeling, emotion, and subjectivity. This interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is informed by the philosophical revisions of the body in the theories of Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Schilder, Merleau-Ponty, and others, which facilitated and paralleled the Abstract Expressionist endeavor. Current theory, particularly the work of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, provides an invaluable hermeneutic aid in understanding Abstract Expressionism as an art of and closer to the lived, experiential body of being.
