ABSTRACT
Lighting up a cigarette, Jon said that showing that kind of blow-up of a Pollock painting was an interesting ‘laboratory experiment’, but didn’t have any historical value. No actual persons, apart from art history students and their lecturers, had ever seen a portion of Number 1A 1948 that big. It made the stripes of yellow aluminium paint in the corner look like runny egg yoke. Paul chipped in that you’d have to learn to call it ‘aluminum’, as T.J. Clark had said, sounding like he was doing an Elvis impression, in the video interview with Fried they’d all seen before the seminar. Jorge, from Berlin for the year, said that he didn’t have a clue what the lektor had been going on about – what could it mean to say that Pollock had tried to make his painting ‘resistant’ to the readings that were to be made of it after his death? That was just a paraphrase of Clark’s argument, explained Lingo, who was writing his dissertation on ‘Pollock and Metaphoricity’. How do you get from looking at the canvas – or rather looking at some dodgy slides of it – to the sorts of philosophical explanations the books gave you? The two didn’t seem to fit together, said Paul. You either look or read. Writing essays on Pollock was essentially a matter of trotting out the clichéd ‘descriptions’ with a dash of fashionable Theory for good measure, added Jorge, who had to do it in his second language to boot. This kind of cynicism and ignorance Lingo couldn’t stand – he’d actually gone to MOMA in New York to see the Pollocks. Lined up for a Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute and needing to get a government grant to pay for
‘Annihilation and totality’?1
