WORKING IN THE GAP BETWEEN ART AND LIFE: FRANK O’HARA’S PROCESS POEMS

MARK SILVERBERG

In the mid 1940s took an important step in his painting that would become a provocative symbol – not only of Abstract , but also for neo-avant-garde artwork in general in the 1950s. Around this time, Pollock began tacking his large unstretched canvases to the floor of his tool shed studio on Long Island, and painting in a spontaneous, “direct” manner. The movement from easel to floor marked a decisive step in what Harold Rosenberg would come to call “Action Painting”. With the canvas on the floor, Pollock could not only approach his work from all sides and at all angles, he could also, as he famously stated, be “literally in the painting” (Shapiro 1990: 356). Pollock explained that this new method allowed the artist to treat the painting as an extension of the body and as a process of discovery rather than an act of intention. The subject of the painting was not an external object to be represented, but an internal state whose process was simultaneously discovered and defined in the act of painting. Pollock’s work became one of the most successful examples of what was soon called “process art”, a term used to denote the shift from end result (product) to creative behaviour (process) that is highlighted not only in Pollock’s action painting, but also in many contemporary neo- avant-garde forms: John Cage’s aleatory music, Robert Rauschen- berg’s chance-inspired Combines, Merce Cunningham’s unscripted dance Events, and ’s , among others. In contemporary poetry, process was highlighted by many practitioners: from Charles Olson’s emphasis on breath (in his famous manifesto “Projective Verse” [1950]) to Allen Ginsberg’s and Jack Kerouac’s method of “spontaneous bop prosody”, to the painterly “action poetry” of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and others. Willem de Kooning once remarked that Pollock “broke the ice” for American painters. One of the many reasons Pollock looms so large in 38 Mark Silverberg the American cultural imagination is that his “breakthrough” signified a shift not only in painting but in all the arts: a shift from product to process, from representation to dramatisation, from contemplation to action. Pollock’s “breakthrough” seemed to open a new painterly and metaphorical space (which, Pollock’s promoters would have us believe, allowed both for a new kind of painting and a new kind of relation between artist and work). But though Pollock was repeatedly heralded as a path blazer in fact what he did, like so many artists of the neo-avant-garde, was to reprise techniques of the historical avant- garde (here in particular surrealist automatism – though now in a plastic form). Along with the foregrounding of the artist’s process, his gesture or action, Pollock’s work productively revived the dilemma of the relationship between art and life. By blurring the line between unconscious gesture and premeditated brushstroke, between body and canvas, in other words, between life and art, Pollock brought to the fore the problematic at the centre of Peter Bürger’s well-known theory of the avant-garde. Over the past decade Bürger’s work has come under intense scrutiny from many quarters, and in particular his central idea that the avant-garde sought to reintegrate art and life has been seen as “precipitate and overly simplistic” in the words of Richard Wolin (quoted in Murphy 1999: 27). A major problem is that Bürger totalises and dehistoricises the infinitely multifaceted categories of “life” and “art”. By removing their historical specificity, and setting them up as binary opposites, Bürger makes “art” and “life” unproductive abstractions. “What is art and what is life here?” Hal Foster asks in The Return of the Real.

Already the opposition tends to cede to art the autonomy that is in question, and to position life at a point beyond reach. In this very formulation, then, the avant-garde project is predisposed to failure. (Foster 1996: 15)

And of course fail it does in Bürger’s theory – though as Foster points out, from Bürger’s point of view the avant-garde fails “heroically, tragically” (1996: 13). I want to suggest that neo-avant-garde art, and process art in particular, asks us to question the sense of some absolute, utopian sublation of life and art, and instead keeps art and life in play, as perennially contingent categories. For the neo-avant- garde Bürger’s “reintegration” is less “a concrete goal to be implemented”, as Richard Murphy (1999: 259) has noted “than a general orienting principle to be borne in mind, a question to be