Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION
recast aesthetic practice and move out into uncolonized areas of experience,”
the result could only be the incorporation of new territory into the domain of
bourgeois culture. Just as the Bolshevik seizure of power in fact marked not victory
over oppression but the inauguration of a new form of it, modernism’s
aspirations led to a double failure, meeting not only with the inherent weakness
of fine art as a form of social action but with its inevitable incorporation into the
visual practices of capitalist society. Any success in representing the hitherto
unrepresented, the “wilderness”—say, through the use of poured paint as a
metaphor for spontaneity—served ultimately to bring it inside the dominant sign
system, perhaps providing a vocabulary of images required by the postwar consumer
culture. Beaton’s photographs literally transformed Pollock’s abstractions
into grounds for his fashion-plate figures, emblems of class privilege.
The photographs are nightmarish. They speak to the hold of capitalist
culture: that is, to the ease with which it can outflank work done against
the figurative, and make it part of a new order of pleasures—a sign of
that order’s richness, of the room it has made for more of the edges and
underneath of everyday life.
(p. 365)
Abstraction, developed in opposition to the banality of figurative art, is absorbed
as no more than a new style into bourgeois culture. The wilderness is pacified,
developed, cut up into lots for sale. Thus Beaton’s pictures “show the sort of
place reserved within capitalism for painting like Pollock’s.” Nonetheless, Clark
insists, while doomed to submit, Pollock’s painting “fights for room” (p. 365)
within and against that place; specifically, the recurring suggestion of the figure
(in various forms) in Pollock’s work enacts the struggle against bourgeois “codes
and conventions” as a central motif. Most generally, in Clark’s view, Pollock
works “against metaphor: that is to say, against any one of his pictures settling
down inside a single metaphorical frame,” (pp. 331–9) thus fighting its utilization
for new forms of bourgeois expression. The “fact or fear” of its absorption by the
society that is its enemy, Clark argues, “is internalized by modernism and built
into its operations; it is part, even cause, of modern painting’s way with its
medium” (p. 308). What this means in Pollock’s case is the burden of Clark’s
essay. The limitations of this way of construing modernism’s relationship to
modern society is the topic of this chapter.
Pollock’s abstraction
The most successful art style in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s
was a modernist-inflected form of naturalism that went by the name of Regionalism;
its leading practitioners, featured in such national magazines as Time and
Life, were John Stuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock’s teacher at the
Art Students League in New York. It is not unfair to describe this style, which
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