THE NEW
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KERMODE:
Well, then I wonder if you regard it as a possibility, that in
other sciences, in other arts, there might
be
a kind of Copernican
revolution based upon this myth?
GOMBRICH:
That is possible. On the other hand I think it is probably
not all that difficult to understand why action painters act as they
do-they see the world in a rather simple black and white way.
If
I
understand it rightly, and I did talk to action painters about it, they
think that our civilization is soulless, mechanical, completely lacking
in spontaneity and they therefore value spontaneity all the more. I
think that is a very valuable point of view and the only criticism I
have is if they happen to talk nonsense.
KERMODE:
There has been in the past a sense in which there were
analogous assumptions governing all sorts of different intellectual
activities, but when we hear that these action paintings have a con–
fessional quality which reveals a man's psychic conflict or tension,
one of the first things that strikes us is that this doesn't seem to be in
any way analogous
to
other kinds of human activity, that a lawyer or a
scientist, for example, hardly belongs to the same world as the action
painter.
GOMBRICH:
Well, of course, they want to be outside this world. But I'm
not even quite sure that they succeed in that respect. I think there
are a number of links between the talk of the action painters and the
talk of the existentialists. I am not very well versed in these things,
but the very idea that every decision has to be made spontaneously
and cannot be based on anything outside has a good deal of kinship
with the idea of the action painters, hasn't it?
KERMODE:
But what they're trying to do is essentially confessional.
GOMBRICH:
You speak of confessional but frankly I don't quite know
what it is supposed to mean.
If
I make a confession, I have to make it
in words, or in any other forms of signs which I know that a Father
Confessor, or whoever he is, will understand, because the essence of
the confession is, after all, that I communicate something which I have
on my mind. The idea that the action painter or any other painter
communicates what is in his mind seems
to
me very questionable. I
think that you feel some kind of excitement or tenseness, and that in
the context of the jargon of our time you can say that they are striving
for spontaneity or a feeling of anxiety, but all these are after all very
vague terms and surely no real confession of any kind.
KERMODE:
But isn't there behind this a view which is in itself not a new
one, that human gesture is extraordinarily revealing, that in fact it
says what words can't say about the condition of a man's mind?
