For me, Jones' approach to the discussion of the studio's role in art and American culture is the most interesting of this week's reading. Perhaps it's simply that it connects so directly to Catherine Battersby's examination of the roots of the perception of creativity as not just a masculine endeavor, but as something innately male. Though her fixation on weird details like Pollack's hand's position (in a portrait by Arnold Newman) having a suggestive quality can be perplexing ("sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", no?) her observations on how the (male) artist's studio becomes imbued with such sanctimonious reverence are fascinating. The whole notion of isolated genius is so tiring to me. I am tempted to align with Barthes and Foucault and the idea that artists (for them, writers) are all deeply indebted to each other, to the history of aesthetic object, to humanity itself. As I've talked about to some extent, film is a language. We build meaning not solely through content but through specific maneuvers in form as well. And the syntax and vocabulary we employ was developed by everyone who's made films. Maybe Godard gave us the jump cut, Kuleshov, the associative edit, but they watched a lot of movies too. I hope my films are good. I hope other people are moved by them, learn something from them. I hope they contribute to the language. But I don't see how I could claim the mythological creation that we try to award to great artists. It all looks like empty male ego to me.
I argue that this sanctification, while being deeply embedded in the masculine self-worship that Jones discusses, is also just plainly counter-productive to what art should be. Art should be a tool for liberation. Becoming a god doesn't liberate anyone but the becomer. How can an artist claim to be valuable to others if those OTHERS are immediately placed under the artist's feet, the expectation of a foot washing the only meaning to glances exchanged?
Not to mention the phony liberation that so many of the Abstract Expressionists claim, while admitting it as isolation. Isolation is a self-liberation but it certainly helps no one else. Except in Pollack's case, I guess, since he was such an abusive prick.
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I find the idea of a shared language that we all contribute to positive and potentially productive when considering art practice. You might be interested in Griselda Pollock's analysis of the avant-garde community. She argues that the way the ideas of artist-genius and originality perpetuated through the 19th and 20th centuries was through the structure of reference-deference-difference. "To make your mark in the avant-garde community, you had to relate your work to what was going on: reference. Then you had to defer to the existing leader, to the work or project which represented the latest move, the last word, or what was considered the definitive statement of shared concerns: deference. Finally your own move involved establishing a difference which had to be both legible in terms of current aesthetics and criticism, and also a definitive advance on that current position." (Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 14.) This structure is actually still around today...curators/museums/galleries looking for the next big thing that relates to what has been done so far but is also somehow new/different/better. What you are proposing might be a paradigm shift...what if we look at art as a shared language that's constantly expanding and not as a series of "advancements"?
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