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experience would have been one of enormous sensuous immediacy in which
there was also an appeal to thought. For they would have seen a certain kind of
transformation of the physical substances (pigment, canvas) that form a
painting , which occurred without ever having denied those substances . They
would have seen a materially self-evident web of paint generate a very special
sense of luminous depth. It was special in that it did not belong to any partic–
ular known space, like a landscape; and it had no chartable dimensions.
Instead it was space seen abstractly as the property of paintings (the way colors
or textures are the properties of objects), rather than as their illustrated
content . Since space or depth is the opposite of flatness , it is paradoxical that
depth should be seen as a property of the flat surface of Pollock's paintings.
But the energy of Pollock's work was generated by that paradox. The lumi–
nous flatness of
Autumn Rhythm
was space turned into an abstract idea which
could shape the material givens of a work and its contents into a single,
continuous , object of perception. What those people are remembering, then ,
is a particular moment of intuition which is sometimes called an aesthetic
experience , and which Wolfe renders in his text, with a sputter of italics and
fancy punctuation , as " . ..
it.
. . . "
For those people, the ones who have had that kind of immediate exper–
ience in relation to works of modernist art , who have felt grateful for and
convinced by its afftrmation of the seriousness of a certain kind of human
enterprise , who have been affected by the forms it has found to embody the
moods and modes ofconsciousness , Wolfe's thesis remains consistently beside
the point because Wolfe
IS
charging in
The Painted Word
that they have not
had that experience-that
" it. "
According to him, there really isn't any
experience to be had. But there are many people who have responded to
modern works of art , and for them that fact is completely beyond argument.
The point that it is beyond argument needs to be emphasized. Because
whatever knowledge one might want to see as being established by that
primary experience-and different writers about art have obviously had
different conceptions of the directions a critical response might take-critical
response begins and ends in the authenticiry of that experience .
By implying that with respect to modern art, speciftcally modern abstract
art , there isn 't any experience, Wolfe creates the inference that those who
make it and those who respond to it are simply shamming; and in order to
cover up this deceit they have either constructed or become dependent upon a
barrage ofwords known as critical theory . In relation
to
the elaborate con they
are pulling, this critical theory functions as an emotionally feeble but polit–
icall y powerful substitute for the experience that isn ' t there. Further, their
motives for engaging in this game range from self-aggrandizement and self–
flattery , through the basest kind of venality and economic self-promotion to a
