… De Kooning was offering to revive experience — first for himself, then for anyone who would pay attention. His art encouraged flexibility, opening people to being disturbed, to being moved, to feeling their own feeling.
This is from Between Sense and De Kooning by Richard Shiff (2011):
… Movement is a fiction in relation to the appearance of the body at any moment, just as the appearance of the body at any moment is an illusion in relation to the reality of the body’s continual movement in the continuity of space and time.
… To finish a work is to present it as an illusion, since it should, in its reality, continue to change and grow, not in a progressive sense but as a transit from one state of mobility to another, each of them real. ‘He is not just concerned with how it looks but how it feels,’ Ashton commented, considering the entirety of de Kooning’s career in 1976: ‘De Kooning’s space and light demand that we perceive how it feels to move through these created spaces and how entities moving through such charged spaces are reformed, deformed, metamorphosed.’
… ‘How different painting man is from writing man. Painting has its reasons which reason knows not.’ [Ashton] De Kooning internalized the other’s body in his, so that painting amounted to acting out, or acting through, bodily forms that could belong either to him or to someone else.
[ ... ]
… In 1949, probably already feeling uneasy about de Kooning’s unabated interest in figure painting, Greenberg warned him that it was now impossible to paint a face; for ambitious artists, history had made abstraction inescapable, the only proper choice. This was not a theoretical principle but Greenberg’s empirical and pragmatic realization: paint no more faces. De Kooning undercut the argument in his typically transversal manner: ‘That’s right, and it’s impossible not to’ …
… To recall the thinking of Peirce: ‘When a disturbance of feeling takes place, we have a consciousness of gain, the gain of experience.’ De Kooning was offering to revive experience — first for himself, then for anyone who would pay attention. His art encouraged flexibility, opening people to being disturbed, to being moved, to feeling their own feeling.
… When Greenberg reviewed de Kooning’s abstractions in 1948, he undermined in advance the potential complaint that abstract artists of this ilk lacked a traditional painter’s skills. De Kooning was resisting the comforts of his hand for the sake of a higher form of human feeling:
Emotion that demands singular, original expression tends to be censored out by a really great [technical] facility, for facility has a stubbornness of its own and is loath to abandon easy satisfactions … There is a deliberate renunciation of will in so far as it makes itself felt as skill.
This next is from a section called ‘Projection’ about criticism of de Kooning’s work, particularly of his Woman paintings:
People don’t see the humor in my ‘Women.’ They talk too much of their tragedy and violence. As for me, I’ve found them comical, but with a bit of pathos because they’re so ugly. I had the same attitude that a caricaturist has. You know that I’ve always loved comic book art. It’s both true and funny, serious and silly. My ‘women’ are like caricatures. I’m not a misogynist and I’ve never had problems with women. Many of my paintings of women have been self-portraits. [De Kooning]
And a decade earlier, having been asked to comment on his Woman image, he also gave it a bemused parodic content: ‘He calls them “cousins” of billboard bunnies and film frails, but they also will remind him of a girl who passed by in the street.’
Woman III, 1953… Interpretation identifies a painting or any made thing, any fiction or manufacture, as if it were a text that speaks of its maker and its context. Pursuing such interpretations, ‘we take the fictional text to be nonfictional relative to the culture.’ How ironical: who is the critic — who are we — to presume to read an artist’s signs, either as truths or as falsehoods that reveal deeper truths through lying? … The encounter has the potential to reveal more about our own fictive reality than about the other’s ‘hidden’ truths.
… It could be argued that all interpretation of images amounts to self-seduction — we convert the image into the realization of what we already believe must be reality — except in the case of genuine shock, when the experience of the art object (its sensation) breaks through the existing ideological orders of reason and fantasy.
… [As an example of self-seductive interpretation, critic James] Fitzsimmons indicated that the implications of de Kooning’s image of Woman for society were, or should be, frightening: ‘I have heard her described as the American woman of the future … This female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse and infantile in ourselves, also personifies all that is still undeveloped … It is to the unconscious (and to the American unconscious in particular, I fear) that Woman appeals.’
[This next paragraph precedes the last two above in the original.]
… As I have suggested, de Kooning’s cartoonish Woman could be seen as a parodic critique of American postwar conformity, with its advertising image of the all-American girl: part pin-up, part cheerleader, part housewife, part mother. This was the view of [Thomas B.] Hess and also Elaine de Kooning, more intimately informed and more sympathetic commentators on the artist than Greenberg was. In the same vein, Ashton considered the later Woman images, those of the 1960s, as ‘high parodies’ loaded with visual puns on the canonical postures of pin-up girls …
My most recent previous post from Shiff’s book is here.
-Julie
