Abstract Expressionism In Art Is Really Primal Realism

Merlot-Ponty

The philosophy of Maurice Merlot-Ponty treats human senses themselves as the proper locations of expression. Eyesight, for example, is the human body's anatomical expression of light stimuli. Similarly, touch, taste, smell, hearing, and proprioception are the human body's unique anatomical expressions of other stimuli.

The idea of expressing oneself to others is secondary to primal expression, which is sensation itself. In other words, we have expressed ourselves unconsciously, long before we intend to or say that we have, and we have done so in a much more fundamental way. Our analysis of our statements about self-expressions are matters of record keeping or means of resonating with like minds that perform similar activities.

Expression Precedes Emotions

Abstract expressionism, thus, seems to have very little to do with emotions. Instead, abstract expressionism has everything to do with pure reflexes and with unconscious predispositions that enable people simply to sense the world and to respond.

I do not believe that Jackson Pollock was involved emotionally with his drip paintings. Emotion had little to do with it. Pollock was responding. He was not expressing. He was an expression. He was an expression of Nature. He even said so, "I am Nature." Pollock was an instrument of Nature's expressing through his actions. He was a stylus recording the fluid script of Nature's most fundamental creative method, which is fluid dynamic flow.

Pollock's Proper Place

In my opinion, historians would be better to classify Pollock as a fluidism artist, because fluidism artists simply feel the flow, and they preserve peak performances of the flow. Pollock, in my view, was a pioneer in this area, because he pushed the medium of liquid paint to its very limit of primal expression, which opened up a frontier to future photographers of fluid dynamics events.

Dry paint can present some peak performances of fluid flow, but wet paint presents other, more fragile peak performances that drying cannot preserve. Drying kills the most short-lived or the most delicate fluid forms. Consequently, if wet paint itself is the subject matter of an art form, then another, different medium best represents the art and records its peaks. This is where photography comes in. Without photography, the most ephemeral fluid forms could not exist as lasting artefacts. Creating such artefacts in response to the human eye's visual expression is the goal of fluidism.

Capture Vs Express

Using a camera to record peak fluid performances is not so much an expressive venture as it is and obsessive venture to be ready to capture what happens naturally. There is indeed an excitement about being in the right place at the right time, but there is no deep emotion in snapping the shutter of a camera to capture beauty. The presumption of the fluidism artist is that beauty will happen spontaneously, without emotion to summon it or give it further significance.

Fluid dynamics beauty is already self-justified. Fluidism artists record it, so that human, biological expressions of vision can enable repeated enjoyment of it after it disappears. Fluidism artists create an illusion of permanence where there is no true permanence to any one form of beauty. These artists, thus, prove that beauty is a rhythm or an action, not a thing or a static object. This active beauty, furthermore, expresses itself through the artists, not because of artists willing it into existence.

(c) 2011 Robert G. Kernodle