560
PARTISAN REVIEW
shock of the Klan image, to release the monstrous emotionality of
which the human being is capable. A few images, mostly mun–
dane-heads, legs, cigarettes, paintbrushes, a whip, the sea-freely
combine and imply each other, frequented by a painting tech–
nique as subtle or as startled as in his abstract expressionism, and
yield what legitimately might be called Guston's mature confes–
sional styIe of painting. A friend of and artistic inspiration to New
York School poets, Guston also shares thematic and stylistic con–
cerns of the so-called confessional poets, those voices who do not
so much gossip about their lives as "open sources of repression."
However art may evolve stylistically, the sensational endures
through the belief that only exaggerated sensory excitement can
adequately express the apocalyptic extremes human beings feel.
The assumption here is that climactic states of being are intrin–
sically excessive, demanding a pitch of sensation and feeling in
keeping with such aberrant human experience. But as an epithet,
"sensational" applies to works whose sense of climax, though tem–
porarily compelling, remains unconvincing because it claims
more than it realizes. While melodrama and yellow journalism
urge an authentic crisis or revelation, they
deliver
instead a crisis
posture of virtual but not actual revelation. Recently, special
pleading for artistic hyperbole has been given in literary theory,
especially the Derridaen notions of the surpl us of the signifier and
the exorbitance of expression that signals creative outpouring
and perhaps, if not a crisis of identity, then a crisis of expression.
And visual artists have increasingly aligned themselves with this
thinking.
Yet one thing distinguishing current from previous sensa–
tional painting is the swaggering confidence with which artists
adopt these stances: compared to their immediate predecessors,
current artists are not apologetic or ambivalent towards their sen–
sational appropriations; at any rate, they display little of the irony
that might betray discomfort with their declared sensational
intent. This self-assured exploitation of the sensational is an atti–
tude anticipated by pop art, for, as a result of its esthetic interven–
tion, superficiality of reference is now taken for granted. By 1966
Max Kozloff could speak of "an accelerating cult of enthusiasm, a
movement of the sensibility which might be called 'Warholism,'
in which nothing has to be proved or justified.... " In retrospect,
one can observe that it is myth made fashionable, as in Warhol's
