Anti-Portraiture by Fiona Johnstone

Author:Fiona Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Images of the artist and the reception of avant-garde art in post-war United States

Morris’s art from the early 1960s consistently demonstrates an anxious concern regarding the question of whether and to what extent viewers are able to experience something of the artist’s studio practice when they encounter finished works. As Morris has put it, during this period he felt that ‘making objects entailed … a deliberate process that exists in time but is generally not visible in the object. I suppose there is something here that relates to Marx’s analysis of value and the commodity – i.e. how labour is unseen in the commodity.’10

One of his best-known pieces from this period, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), illustrates this concern especially neatly. This work is a wooden box, containing a tape-recording that Morris made while producing the object, which is played through external speakers. The tape includes the noise of his carpentry as well as other ambient studio sounds, so it is an index of his working practice and perhaps even a kind of auditory portrait. However, in practice it also produces a sense of distance from the artist, since viewers are made highly aware that although they can hear his labour, they cannot actually see it. As in Scale with Hand, spectators are initially invited to experience the artist’s physical relationship with the piece, but it subsequently becomes clear that in reality any route to doing so is barred.

Morris’s concern that artworks might not offer any means of properly apprehending the artist’s bodily activity should be understood as a reaction to the legacy of Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings. As Amelia Jones has argued, ‘the gestural loops of paint’ that feature in these works seem to ‘tell the “story” of Pollock’s body in action’, such that it seems as if viewers can recreate the artist’s process by visually tracing the marks on his canvases.11 Morris has also said as much himself, claiming that in Pollock’s work, ‘the process is registered in the way the paint splashes or drips or falls. You have some indication that it was put down that way.’12 As Jones notes, this means that Pollock’s drip paintings ‘fall clearly on the side of indexicality’ rather than iconicity, because they indicate Pollock’s bodily movements through a direct, physical connection.13 Morris’s common use of bodily indexes in works from the early 1960s also suggests a more specific link with Pollock’s drip painting Number 1A (1948), which famously includes several handprints in its top-right corner. As the curator Charles Stuckey has written, these prints are ‘signatory, since they bear witness to Pollock’s physical role in the creation of the painting and confirm the interpretation of his work as “action painting” ’.14

The particular ‘interpretation’ of Pollock’s art that Stuckey referred to in the above quotation had its roots in an essay called ‘The American Action Painters’, which was written by the critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952. This text was extremely influential in the United States during the 1950s and the early 1960s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.