watching the detectives: The emmergence of popular culture

Watching the detectives

The emergence of American ‘Art’ photography and the impact of popular culture. Having briefly touched on the influence of Alfred Stieglitz in founding a school of Fine Art Photography, it is worth examining the contextual climate of ‘Fine Art’ in more general terms. The Post war period witnessed a change of direction in art practice which in The United States is best categorised by the movement termed ‘Abstract expressionism’ This title whilst not hard to define in terms of the key protagonists,  has a wide ranging definition in terms of creative output. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, which, as we have discussed has its emphasis on the spontaneous, automatic or subconscious act of creation. Jackson Pollock’s dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that in turn had its roots in the work of Max Ernst, which in turn can trace a direct lineage to European expressionism. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his “white writing” canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the “all over” look of Pollock’s drip paintings.The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, rather nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and is even applied to work which is not especially abstract or expressionist. Pollock’s energetic “action paintings“, with their “busy” feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to the violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning (which are figurative paintings) and to the serenely shimmering blocks of color common to Mark Rothko’s work (not  usually called expressionist but which Rothko denied was abstract), yet all three are classified as abstract expressionists.Abstract Expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists works (and what could be more spontaneous than photography)  most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it; An exception might be the drip paintings of Pollock.Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression but also by the Social Realists of Mexico such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.  The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of such painters. Abstract expressionism arose during World War II and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York like The Art of This Century Gallery.  The Political repression ‘The McCarthy era’ after World War II was a time of extreme artistic censorship in the United States, but since the subject matter was often totally abstracted, it became a safe strategy for artists to pursue this style. Abstract Art could be seen as apolitical, or if the art was political, the message was largely for the Art insider.Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially the San Francisco Bay area. To me the period is characterised as being socially unsettled.A time when the previous status quo both politically and artistically were being if not overturned, then re-examined. Individually the remnants of an older art establishment were rejecting their previous artistic position/heritage, while collectively a new generation was searching for a voice. A vacuum begs to be filled, and filled it was with a new language of art that in the United States in particular was entirely more demographic; serving as a mirror for a deconstructed society. The language of the visual now in ascendant, the great American painting now sharing the limelight with the Great American novel.But where was photography in this new beginning? The Answer is sharing a language and source of inspiration with the elder sibling. In post war America  the scatter gun objectification of the lens capturing the imagination of  the new consumer society. What was fruit for the mass, Cinema-Television-Advertising serving  as a palette of inspiration for the artist. The camera became draftsman, holding fixed forever that ephemeral moment of Artist and subject. The photographic image, abstract at its point of birth, yet denoting a ghost of the real, becoming in its connotative form growing in  inference and influence. The progeny of this state of flux was popular culture. No more apt term could conjure up the essential zeitgeist of the moment. The post-modern society with its disconected social and artistic tissue on display, replicating the flicker of the moving image with its ever present re- positioning of the flavour of the moment.The purely popular reigning supreme over the intellectual, the academic. Popular culture and it’s offspring, Pop Art, serving to represent a new society. But Photography in the post war era was not all primarily focused on the ephemeral here and now. Photographers like Robert Frank essentially turning the lens inward in a more reflective way, seeking to record the emotional pulse of an America largely forgotten. The post war generation (or those who survived the war) did not all relocate to the large commercial cities. Many returned to the homestead, to a lifestyle in many ways deposed by the mechanics of war. Trying to desperately pick up the threads of neglected relationships. Fathering small children often for the first time and trying to rebuild a sharecropper economy if not killed by the great depression now often terminally sick. Frank traveled in the  hinterland of abandoned homesteads and empty highways, his work a marked contrast to the images of towering cities, cocktail parties and a burgeoning economy.

Watch this space, to be continued: 5/10/07