Pollock is the greatest protagonist in the battle for painting. He raises all the questions
that an artist especially a modern painter should. But using gesture is only postponing the problems of painting, and creating a far more intoxicating discussion for painting. In placing himself inside the painting, not only as the messenger but also as the subject
he destroys the mythical space between the canvas and the artist. He
extinguished the desire of possession that is created in, and by, that space.
Within his gestures he ram raids through the shop window of all painting with
perspective, stealing all of their thunder, their narrative and conventions.
But paradoxically has now driven painting down a cul de sac. Pollock dramatised
his entrapment in his last works, attempting to re-negotiate his drip technique
in a longing for figuration. He seemed to have worked through to an ending point.
One of painting dilemmas in the twentieth century is this seeming conflict or antagonism , between painting’s representational function and its self- reflection. Paintings should not be a thesis but an argument. As such it is meant to serve. Its purpose is to consider the space into which a painting draws the spectator (its fictional space), assigning them a place in the charade of ‘viewing’. It contains the space of the painting and the space of the viewer, they overlap but are irreducible. The artist and the viewer both, in turn observe the painting, which from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity. The fact that painting has survived this aesthetic turmoil is perhaps due to this capacity to endlessly renew that feeling of separation, the critical distance experienced by the viewer in front of the canvas. To the artist, making a painting is first of all a private act aimed at a personal eye; its value in the open world being the degree to which it can engender the relationship between the idea
manifesting on the canvas and the thoughts and experience of the individual viewer.
Richter, a painter whose work and thinking about painting has been a hugely influential on younger artists, has vividly described his ‘pioneering ‘ attitude to making
pictures. “If I paint an abstract picture. I neither know in advance what
it is suppose to look like, nor where I intend to go while I am painting, what
could be done, to what end. For this reason the painting is quasi blind”.
Painting creates the clearest equivalent to the process of seeing, by placing the viewer in the position of the artist, with nothing but the canvas before them. In this process of identification with the role of the artist, the viewer reoccupies the centre of the scene. this gaze that organises the painting and the gaze for which it is displayed meet in that present moment. Is this ability to see and be seen, to be both painter and viewer.
