A Tale of Two Paintings

There’s a new painting up in the modern and contemporary gallery of the Fogg. Or perhaps “painting” is too strong a word. The 2001 work, Dorian Gray by the American artist Martin Kline, at first glance looks remarkably like a gigantic black mud splat. Kline used encaustic, a pasty wax-based paint, to make this work, and the result is a highly textured oval mound of pigment, roughly the shape and convexity of a shield, that juts forward close to three inches from the center of the board. The board itself is a vertically-oriented rectangle (roughtly three feet by four feet) of plain unfinished wood with a slightly raised strip frame around the edges and a light, blond-colored grain. Ironically enough, Dorian Gray shares a gallery with the Fogg’s prize Jackson Pollock painting, No. 2, dating from 1950. Ironically, because Kline’s work seems in some ways a grotesque caricature of Pollock’s explosively gestrual drips. A recent thrust of Pollock scholarship has been to emphasize the visceral, almost disgusting materiality of his paintings: the thick, wrinkly surface of the congealed paint, the opacity and admitted ugliness of many of his color choices, and the debris (ranging from sand to nails and cigarette butts) that he often embedded in the surfaces of his paintings. These material qualities, together with the fact that he worked on the floor rather than an easel and didn’t so much paint per se as splash paint down onto the canvas, letting gravity do most of the work for him, suggest a reading of Pollock’s work as a kind of debasement of painting itself. And according to some scholars, this material quality is one of the most art-historically significant qualities of his work. It is the quality most influental on the next generation of American artists, for example Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson. (Warhol explicitly exaggerated the base connotations of Pollock’s painting in his so called “Piss Paintings,” which he made by urinating onto—and thereby oxidizing—canvasses that had been coverd in metallic pigments. Smithson explored similar ideas in his glue and asphalt pours, in which he poured glue or asphalt down a hill and let the action of gravity on viscous quality of the material dictate the form it took.)

If base materialism is indeed Pollock’s most important legacy to younger artists, then in Kline’s case we can certainly say that the pupil has surpassed the master. Looking at a Pollock, you might be vaugely disturbed by it’s aggressive materiality, but looking at Kline, I have to say I was positively repulsed. There is something uncannily biological about the pattern of deep crevices and protruding nubs of encaustic that build up its mounded surface. It reminds me of a giant fungus-—if I reached out and touched it, I don’t think I would be surprised if its surface was warm and slimy, or even, for that matter, if it tried to suck me in by my finger and eat me like some unholy slime from Aliens.

The first time I saw Dorian Gray in that gallery, I couldn’t even look at No. 2 afterward. In comparison, the Pollock just seemed compleltely unstimulating: flat, bland, tame. I remember being very angry about this. I knew that the Pollock was a good painting, but I felt that Kline had somehow spoiled it for me. It was as if I had snacked on too much salty junk food and couldn’t taste anymore when I sat down to eat a nice meal.

I felt that Kline hadn’t beaten Pollock, he had simply outshouted him. He had taken one appealing aspect of Pollock’s painting—its base materiality—and excessively amplified it. And I think this kind of one-upsmanship is especially dangerous when it comes to base materiality or any similar strategy specifically designed to provoke a strong visceral response from the viewer. The problem is not that these strategies don’t suceed, but rather that they suceed far too well. At a certain point I think the visceral-reaction-inducing qualities begin to take over the entire work, and—precicesly because they succeed so well in provoking a reaction—it becomes hard for a work that is anything other than uni-dimensional to compete.

But the next time I visited that gallery, I realized that maybe Kline hadn’t really spoiled Pollock for me, and that to think so was merely the symptom of overly dogmatic thinking on my part. After all, Kline could only really spoil Pollock if they existed as two competing entities on the same spectrum of a single quality (in this case, base materiality). But of course the relationship between two works of art, let alone the works themselves, are never actually that simple. And indeed, on my next visit the Pollock no longer looked boring compared to the Kline, but refreshingly spare, more delicate and calligraphic than I remembered. Looking back at the Kline after realizing this about the Pollock, I noticed something I had completely missed before; the encaustic wasn’t all black, but was split into two zones, one of black and one of dark gray. Where the two tones met, the knobby protrusions of paint had a dark top and lighter bottom as if they had been carefully shaded to emphasize their three-dimensionality, and this lent the piece a shimmering, optical quality that presented an intruiging and suprisingly subtle contrast to the fugus-like materiality of the paint itself.

To make a long story short, Kline’s painting was much more interesting to look at than I had first supposed, and I think my return trip to the gallery provided a valuable lesson: You can get into trouble if you approach art with concepts or catagories that are too rigid, especially if you try to frame your experience of the work in terms of these preconcieved notions. Sometimes I think the best thing to do is simply sit back and let the paintings talk to you, and to each other.