Anodyne
Sunday, February 04, 2007
 

Untitled poem-painting by Kenneth Patchen (from the sequence Wonderings, New Directions, 1971)


Philip Guston, Multiplied, 1972

Further contexts for ghosts: Patchen's lumpy spirit-animals and Guston's late "cartoony" renderings of Klansmen and household objects. Relatives, too, of my Incredible Talking Cats, lares, "little household gods."

Guston faced down immense critical and public pressure to renounce figuration and return to the gestural abstraction for which he was then best known. According to Arthur Danto, "Guston's transit from abstraction to cartoon was cruelly [and representatively] portrayed by Hilton Kramer in a widely cited review as a passage from 'mandarin' to "stumblebum.' The term 'mandarin' was intended to diminish what had set Guston apart as an abstractionist. The paintings were too dainty, too delicate, too light and airy by contrast with the heavy pigment of the true expressionist to be considered authentic. The new ["cartoony"] paintings were then seen as an opportunistic bid for that missed authenticity. They were coarse, juvenile and demotic." And Patchen always stood apart from any movement, repeatedly resisting the Beats' attempts to co-opt him on board their rapidly accelerating wagon. Guston's and Patchen's example -- the straight-forward pursuit of personal concerns, with no regard to careerism or public success -- is one I really admire, and just as important to the ghosts as better-publicized contexts like Yoshitoshi's prints or Jack Spicer's spooks.
- posted by cjb @ 11:11 AM


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