Q.  So, if that’s what you think of the early modernists, what do you think of the Action Painters?

A.  Well, first of all, I still prefer to call them the Abstract Expressionists. I get the feeling that someone is trying to place the focus on Pollock. There’s also a certain secondary preemption of the tradition in calling them Action Painters, a certain attempt to underwrite specific consequences, specific historical derivations. I don’t think Abstract Expressionism, as a term, is necessarily redundant, since most of the artists eschewed formalistic abstraction. Generally, they were still looking for expressive or painterly force. And when you focus on that, I think you can follow it back and see the fairly direct link to Expressionism.

            But, of course, with the Abstract Expressionists, you’re looking at the radical deconstruction in full flower. From the perspective of Abstract Expressionism, the experiments of early modernism are all tangential or sidereal – almost an attempt to hold onto something by moving sideways. But the Abstract Expressionists go to the heart of it. It’s as if they’ve gone to the most primitive core of the painterly tradition and asked the Zen question, ‘What is it?’ And, as I’ve said elsewhere, they break it down into basic questions: What is color? What is the brush? What is form?

Q.  Am I missing something? It almost sounds like you approve of them, which I would find hard to understand after what you’ve said about the early modernists.

A.  Basically, I think that the best of the Abstract Expressionists are far more honest than the early modernists. I don’t necessarily approve of them. I certainly don’t approve of them wholesale. But it seems to me they were closer to the historical imperative, to the peculiar necessity of their time. And that shows in the work.

            I want to backtrack here, and go back to my parallel between the literary and the visual. But I think I want to revise my earlier statement some. The truth of the matter is, the literary never went the full deconstructive route. It’s the difference I spoke of in terms of the basic differences of how the art carries the cultural history. In fact, the history of the literary and the visual work in parallel, timewise; they go through the same progression simultaneously. But the literary, even poetry, can never ultimately abandon the thread of explicit meaning. Every instrument in the sculptural or painterly toolbox carries its array of values, but the values are explicit in themselves. Unlike words and syntax, they are not referential. You cannot break down language to mere sound and syntax and produce anything identifiable as art.
            But, as long as you have the painterly tradition, however residual, you can break the visual arts down to color or form or the instruments themselves, and still have the direct value content that potentially inheres in art.
            So, in fact, the only real deconstruction, from a cultural point of view, is Abstract Expressionism.

Q.  Are you denying the deconstructive force in philosophy? That sounds like a contradiction in terms with respect to your basic thesis.

A.  What I’m saying is that the philosophical recognition is after the fact. Philosophy is going through much the same process in terms of its own instruments – or perhaps I should say in terms of its only instrument. Because, by the end – by the early 20^th century – philosophy is defining itself almost exclusively in terms of logic. Logic becomes the key issue. And the assertion of ‘deconstruction’ itself is ultimately the failure of logic – the involution of logic, in which any self-sustaining premise for logic fails.
            But, if you look at it carefully, I think you’ll see that philosophy does not arrive at deconstruction from a self-view. It arrives at the assertion through observation of the culture. Philosophy itself still hasn’t acknowledged the failure of logic. That is, it hasn’t isolated the failure. Philosophers are willing to talk about the death of philosophy, but not about the death of logic or analysis. It is the death of these things – at least as they were ultimately defined by the academic philosophers – that provokes the ‘deconstructive’ presentation as philosophy. But the focus is outward and not inward. 

            But we’re both drifting here. And I actually want to get back to the Abstract Expressionists, precisely because they bring the ‘deconstruction’ to focus in a way that’s fully culturally appropriate.
            You asked if I approved of them. But the real issue is relative values. I have yet to find a Kline that doesn’t hold my attention. Picasso synthesizes a personal style, but, as far as I’m concerned, the style doesn’t bespeak a whole personality. Only occasionally does a motif or a color relationship stop me for a moment. It’s as if, knowing the ‘style’ as a cultural function, the rest is largely repetition. But Kline fills the canvas. At the same time, I can’t quite get to him. The mystery, to me, is the consistency of my reaction. The force in a Kline is not artificial. The personality is there, in the sense of real style, but somehow it doesn’t come through in fullness. It’s not like Bonnard, where eventually I go in and meet the whole man as an artist. But in some sense, I can’t deny him as an artist.
            Supposedly, when Rodin would lead his students through the Louvre, when they passed through the room of Ingres, Rodin would say, ‘Your hat in your hand, your eyes on the floor.’ In other words, respect the artist, but realize that there’s nothing you can learn here.
            Obviously, Kline and Rothko and so forth are a far cry from Ingres. There is, precisely, a directness of expression in the Abstract Expressionists, at least in the successful ones.
            But, for me at this point, Rothko is the only other one that takes a place near Kline. But I feel a strange sadness in the formalism, as if he had to suppress and distort some deeply personal desire in order to succeed at that level. I cannot deny both the painterly quality and some of the same force of personality that I experience in front of a Kline. And, in a sense, at a lower level, there’s more of Rothko in a Rothko than there is of Kline in a Kline. But the sadness and the foreshortening close it out. I see it, but it doesn’t hold me.
            But the real problem is where do you go with them? What can you do with Kline’s incredible statement about the power of the brush – and the power of the brush as a pure compositional element – except to go back into the painterly tradition? And I think it goes without saying, for anyone who has eyes to see, that the so-called ‘color field’ painters have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there’s no aesthetic future inherent in Rothko’s legacy.

Q.  But what about Pollock and de Kooning?

A.  As I’ve already said, I think Pollock is a moment of the culture and not a moment of the artist. Pollock finds a cultural mode that expresses a cultural moment. But it essentially has no personality in it. If you go looking for an intimate value, the work is opaque. So, if you’re sensitive enough, you can make yourself ill, if you want.
            And I think there’s some of the same element in de Kooning. As you know, at the end of his life, as he dissolved into dementia, his work moved out into a tremendous lyrical opulence. I don’t think it’s a false ad hominem to say that the issue is not whether the final paintings are ‘art’, but whether that impulse didn’t underlie the whole body of his work. Are we looking at a buried romantic at war with himself? Romanticism and decadence are intimate twins, particularly in a culture of the technical. I have no idea who Berdyaev is finally, but a single phrase has stuck with me: ‘the colorless metaphysic of the bourgeoisie’. But the only metaphysic of the bourgeoisie is technique. And technique is inherently an anti-romantic spirit. So, if my reasoning is correct here, we can read de Kooning out in terms of the cult of ugliness as the natural response of a romantic in face of technique as a cultural metaphysics. But, obviously, with de Kooning, the whole process is deeply internalized.
            That said, I have the feeling that his ugliness will always remain ugliness. We want to avoid ‘that feline spirit’, as Henry Miller says, ‘that has us by the balls in America’. But here ‘America’ is just synecdoche for bourgeois understanding. But we cannot make an artform out of the activity of ‘putting down the bourgeoisie’, even though there have apparently been some lengthy and sophisticated arguments for precisely this proposal.
            We can’t deny the power of some of de Kooning’s statements. But this is one I’m willing to leave to history.

            The question is really to find the center of the self in terms of the art. A self-defying conflict like this should be resolved through the art itself. In part, that’s the definition of the aesthetic vocation. And I don’t think dementia qualifies for the kind of conscious resolution that inheres in the vocation.

Q.  Well, this still leaves us with nearly half a century. 

A.  I’m aware of that. But I think this is one of those periods that may largely disappear off the charts, at least in terms of the selected morsels presentations of the classroom.

Q.  You don’t think Pop and Op will have a place in the museum? Or the graffiti artists?
 
A.  The museums feel obliged to present a continuum, so I expect they’ll have their representative pieces.
            Again, it’s not necessarily that I’m dismissing them. But I am dismissing them, because with Warhol you have precisely the rejection of the painterly tradition from within the painterly tradition, so to speak. Before that, you had Dada. And that’s like Kandinsky, a kind of intuitive leap – not just the rejection of the figurative, but the rejection of the core commitment of art. But Abstract Expressionism and ambient New York are the final stages of the tradition, and the acceptance of Warhol and the others explodes that from within.
            There may be something there, if that’s what you want, but it’s beyond the range of my argument. As far as I’m concerned it’s outside the actualities of art. At best, it’s the elevation of graphics and the marketplace, neither of which ultimately have anything to do with art, per se.

Q.  It sounds to me like you’re making an elitist argument for art.

A.  Before we get into some politically correct argument about elitism and mass art, I want you to look at the actualities.
            Warhol had a brilliant graphic sense. He was also an incredibly fastidious graphic artist, in his way. Now, I go into a museum and I see a multiple print piece attributed to Warhol, but the placement and color are all wrong. It’s obviously not by Warhol, but by ‘the factory’. So now you have a PhD fine arts major – a curator in the museum – who doesn’t have a sufficiently aesthetic eye to make this elementary distinction in terms of graphics – basic craft – and you want to have some pc argument about elitism versus mass art?
            Show me some pure sign of connoisseurship somewhere in the culture as it stands, and then we can talk about how we’re going to make that pervasive in the culture. At this point we have critics and curators and academics who are literally blind in terms of aesthetics. And there’s nothing in the core of the culture that’s strong enough to weed them out, or even detect them. And you want me to talk about mass art?
            I have to think it’s not just self-justification. It’s denial. We’re addicted to our ignorance.

Q.  Well, I wouldn’t know where to go from here.
            But there is one question or set of questions that remain for me. I understand some of the cultural and subjective processes you went through to get to this view. But I understand you started out as fairly atavistic in your own art – in the poetry. So I’m curious how you got to this view of the modern – whether it involves your development in the poetry. And, if so, what the substance and relationships were in terms of the poetry. 

A.  An interesting and fairly subtle question. Appropriate. I like it.

            Yes, the poetry was instrumental in moving me from that backward-looking base in Romantic and Renaissance English literature to an appreciation of the modern. I was studying the moderns and the beats and so forth even before I got hooked into the poetry through Keats and Shakespeare. At first Frost and Sandburg, Jeffers and some of Carlos Williams – they all seemed like ‘serious’ poetry – very large in the frame at that point. I could feel Eliot, but he seemed to go out of the frame, in some sense. As did Pound, even in his more lyrical early work. Apart from Canto I, I couldn’t touch the Cantos.
            I’m reading Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, and they’re having a more profound effect, covertly and overtly, respectively; but at this point, I can’t see them as ‘serious’.
            But I’m trying to crack the nut of ‘the modern’ in terms of the contemporary understanding.
            Where I break through, finally, is with Robert Lowell.
            His decadent and atavistic New England heritage tallies with mine, so I was able to grasp him from that perspective.

            As I’ve said, the literary arts never deconstructed in the same way as the visual. Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso form one of those perfect pairs for standard classroom comparisons. But, of course, we’d have to break down departmental walls to assign that essay – an unlikely event, at this point.
            Picasso was looking for a single mask, at least if we judge by the latter part of his career. But Pound was putting on the masks in search of the culture, and finally the cultural search overpowered the aesthetic. The result is a devastating mix of brilliance and obsession. But the underlying impulse arises from both the tacit and the explicit recognition of cultural failure. Since the first War caused Pound to reject the western model, his urge toward synthesis tended outward, but it nevertheless proved largely legitimate at its core, however distorted or foreshortened.
            Lowell and Berryman reflect that directly. Berryman’s Dream Songs and Lowell’s Notebook / History sequences not only refer back directly to Pound’s Cantos, but also further the synthetic impulse culturally.
            Lowell leads me back to Pound, which acculturates and intensifies my own search for a personal synthesis or coherence. That is, it gave my seeking a tentatively objective or cultural frame. So you might say that I took Pound’s rock drill and turned it back on the culture itself until I broke back through into the significance of the Idealists, and hence the whole lost thread of modern western history.