Paul Goodman—What is a picture?

Paul Goodman
Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals
(1962)

"What is a picture?"
(pp. 182-190)

[185] A strong sculpture controls its surrounding space and draws us into it; therefore our space is made continuous with the art-work's, there is only special space. Consider a contrast. Imagine a frame around the Apollo Belvedere and it easily turns into a picture... But imagine a frame around the Moses and you at once get colossal Dada. Going further, imagine a frame around the Captives, not yet free of the rock, and the effect is abhorrent. ...

I take it that this was Jackson Pollock's idea, to control our space and make only one special space, when he said that the onlooker was supposed to be entangled in his big canvases, as in a woods. Not dissimilarly, Rothko's big colored stripes have been called backgrounds that make the people look good; the onlookers have entered a special space and actually are in the picture.

A colored wall limits our continuous space rather than itself being limited, so we do not see it as a picture; but when it is painted with figures, like a mural, it is often a matter of choice whether or not it is a picture. The more architectural, the less pictorial.

...

[187] The fresco fury of Michelangelo is even his outstanding painterly quality... In the past, however, this painting-action was mostly used to underscore such picture properties as appropriateness to the subject, atmosphere, composition, decoration. It has been the genius of our times to isolate painting-action as sometimes sufficient to itself. Such pure gesture sophisticatedly recalls the painting of children or aboriginal petroglyphs ,

Ugh.

in what fascinates us is not the painted product but the transmitted action, the sense of the painter painting.

Our man here finds said transmitted action to be recall ed by said pure gesture . Being initiated, we can propose no remedy. But if a non-initiate found, conversely, that the painting merely recall ed a painting and not an action, we would like to know what (if any) remedy he might propose thereby.

I do not think that such action organizes a special space in any of the ways we have been discussing.

HOORAY!

There is no illusory space and no composition of flat surface. Therefore there is nothing to frame.

WHOOT!

Further, putting a rectangular frame around the action creates wrong assumptions and confuses the direct meaning of the gesture.

Well, I think it depends on who's looking.

Consider, for instance, a real girl skipping down the street or a young chap making a neat double play at second base in a ball game. These are lovely gestures, but to frame them is to kill them: it turns them into cinematographs and destroys their continuity with our space and life.

But perhaps a painting-action might be compared to a dramatic action on a stage,

This is a drama-free zone.

in its specially lit special space framed by the proscenium arch. It seems to me this is a poor analogy.

Agreed.

The proscenium-framed space is much weaker in esthetic texture than the words, acting, and blocking of the drama;

Thank God.

it is easily unattended to; we look past the arch. In a painting, however, the negative rectangle surrounding the painting-action is of almost equal textural value with the painted

[188]

marks;

I find this assertion rather bizarre.

it is colored like them, and extended like them. Therefore it either must be attended to, making a conventional composition, a picture; or it is a dead weight on the action, like an obtrusive set in a play.

The same reasoning holds against those painters who claim that the rectangular canvas is the playground for their action, like the football field for the game. It is again a poor analogy. The spectators of the game do not importantly notice that the grass at the fifty-yard line is worn thin and that the corners want cutting, but the spectators of a painting notice the texture, color, and painted or unpainted quality of the background.

The distinctiveness of certain hallowed stadiums and grounds is actually a huge part of the appeal of sports, whereas certain dimensions, rules, and (occasionally) customs are held constant. For the "true fan" this diversity-within-unity is absolutely a conscious part of the experience. You know when you are looking at Fenway Park, Lambeau Field, or Pebble Beach.

Also, the spectators of the football game know that, by the rules, the game may at any moment spring into any unoccupied territory, so that the whole field is necessary for the game and is potentially alive; whereas a painting gesture is already achieved and much of the rectangle has become dead past.

Is he serious?

When we say that a girl is "pretty as a picture," we mean

We'd really like to get with her but could do without the high-maintenance shenanigans?

that she makes the place of her presence and of her movements divinely special. ...

We speak of the space of the object in the picture, but of the place of the gesture in the world.

Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)

[239] The young people have latched on to the movement in art that is strongest in our generation, the so-called Action Painting or New York School. ... I have tried to show that this disposition to go back to the material elements and the real situation, is intrinsic and spontaneous in the art action and poetry action of some of the young groups. This means that they are not off the main track. It can be said that this Action art lacks content, it does not carry enough humanity. I think this is true. But it is just its eschewing of a stereotyped or corrupt content while nevertheless affirming the incorruptible content of the artist's own action, that is its starved and brave humanity—a step beyond the nihilism of Dada—a beginning.