Abstract expressionism is the visual equivalent of Pentecostalism, which is the most successful form of Christianity since early Methodism. Both Ab-ex paintings and Pentacostalism are 20th century forms of Primitivism—efforts to get back to the basics. Pentacostalism stems from an event described in Acts, 2:3 in which the holy Spirit descended upon a group of Christians and they began speaking in “tongues.” Nobody could understand them. Some witnesses said they were drunk, but Peter denied this, pointing out it was only nine o’clock in the morning!
I don’t know of any ab-ex painters who were conventionally religious, but they all seem to have believed their paintings hint at some ineffable meaning of awesome importance. It was a lost cause. Before long, abstraction expressionism lost its position as king of the hill to the comic book clarity of Pop art and the pretentious obscurity of conceptualism, minimalism and all the other isms.
But I keep going back to the abstract-expressionists. I keep thinking some of their scribbles and blobs are better than others, though I can’t tell you why. In any case, I decided to put something understandable into the pentecostal babble of an abstract expressionist painting. Using black enamel, I dripped Jonathan Edwards assertion:“The being of society, as such, is conversation” across my canvas, and then I turned the canvas and dripped Nietzsche’s apposite lament, “I fear we will never get rid of God because we still believe in grammar” across it the other way. I added color and called it Palimpset. I painted it on the kitchen floor of our apartment shortly after we moved to Manhattan in 1990.
In 2018, I belatedly learned I am not the first to insert words into an abstract painting. In 1943, Jackson Pollock wrote his name in big letters on the abstract mural he did for Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment. Then he obscured the letters with swirls and slashes. You can make them out, but it isn’t easy. This was obviously a passive-aggressive advertisement for himself—a message to the world that hadn’t yet recognized that he was a major artist. But I think it was also a message to himself from himself asserting that Jackson Pollock, a boy from a dysfunctional family “out west” was still alive and kicking amid the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of arty New York.
Paintings and Poems 