Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden:
Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch against imminent, struggling stabilities. There’s something one can’t reduce satisfactorily to formal terms. In 1964 the Romanian-born Eliade, who was a great admirer of his countryman Brancusi, spoke of “nonfigurative painters who abolish representational forms and surfaces, penetrate to the inside of matter, and try to reveal the ultimate structures of substance.” In order to talk about Pollock, and Rothko for that matter, in other than purely formalist vocabularies (and to avoid the useless argument that both were representationalists masquerading as abstractionists), we have to…talk about the sacred and the mundane. Eliade also says that non-representational art corresponds to the “demythologization” in religion advocated by Rudolph Bultmann. As Christianity may dissolve the images and symbols of its traditional narratives to confront once again the freshness of religious experience in our secular, materialistic time, certain artists give up the making of representational images so that they can see through traditional iconography to the world as it could have been seen only on the first day of creation. Moreover, he says, today’s artist “sees only the freshness of the first day of the world—he does not yet see its ‘face.’ The time of the epiphany has not yet arrived, or does the world truly have no face?” I think Pollock and Rothko worked to paint that facelessness. For Rothko it was toned with a magisterial, voluminous solemnity. For Pollock the tone was one of self-devouring conflict.
These ideas of painting the essence of something reminds me of Krishnamurti. Is it possible to sense without thought interfering? To see the tree, but not place it in a mental category? Direct experience, a oneness with the object, seems to be the idea, or the experience of the abstract artist. Looking at the painting becomes an experience. With no form visible, the viewer breaks through artificial boundaries, and enters the artist’s experience of creating.
I would like to think it is possible to sense without thought interfering. I don’t know how else to describe “information” about landscape and the earth that seems to appear in me and in other people I know–maybe it isn’t brained but instead gets bodied in its own non-thought form way.
Great comment, thanks for sharing this point of view.
“There are three monks, who had been sitting in deep meditation for many years amidst the Himalayan snow peaks, never speaking a word, in utter silence. One morning, one of the three suddenly speaks up and says, ‘What a lovely morning this is.’ And he falls silent again. Five years of silence pass, when all at once the second monk speaks up and says, ‘But we could do with some rain.’ There is silence among them for another five years, when suddenly the third monk says, ‘Why can’t you two stop chattering?”
http://www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/jokes.html
http://picasaweb.google.com/serendipidad0/FotosDeJidduKrishnamurti#