September 27, 2006
Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing
I was going to post this later in the week, but decided to make today an all-Gopnik day.
Next month, Princeton University Press will publish Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts as Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Earlier in September I skimmed through PDFs of its chapters, each of which hews closely to one of the six lectures delivered three summers ago. The volume is prefaced with a short appreciation by Adam Gopnik, Varnedoe's close friend, sometime collaborator, and an occasional visual-art critic. From that preface:
Working only with notes, though of course drawing on a lifetime's reservoir of looking and thinking, the seemingly crafted and pregnant sentences present on these pages really were improvised by the speaker in the course of an hour's talking.It was not an irresponsible or offhand improvisation—he knew more or less what he wanted to say and had often rehearsed it, in his own mind and at length with listeners. (And, of course, he worked with an outline and a huge number of slides, which played a mnemonic role.) But the words came ringing out, every Sunday, fresh and unplanned, just as the reader meets them here. Much was premeditated but more was improvised: looking at the images almost always inspired an unexpected thought, instantly blended into the body of the argument, and here preserved. He supposed these lectures to be his last and intended them to be his most important work, his testaments of faith.
The transcribed lectures do indeed maintain fidelity to what I assume was Varnedoe's extemporaneous voice, a quality that, when combined with his unwillingness to stray too far from exegesis of the works themselves, give the book a refreshingly anachronistic feel. Here are a few excerpts from the opening lecture, in which he sets out a game plan:
For many people, who think and write about culture, this moment [the mid-1950s, ed.] marks an even larger watershed between the end of modernism and the inauguration of a postmodern world, a great divide between the world of, say, Henri Matisse and Picasso and that of contemporary art. I am not one of those people, however, and this dichotomy is not what I am here to talk about. [ . . . ] What we want to do is cut through the gas and grab the ideas that flow out of and drive us back toward such confusing, gritty particulars of experience, rather than the ideas that constantly and confidently blend such things into soupy generalities. [ . . . ] I take this topic ultimately because it seems to me one of the most legitimate and poorly addressed questions in modern art. Put another way, I want to ask whether there is any grounding for abstraction, a "logic of the situation," to borrow a term from E.H. Gombrich. [pp. 6-7, 8, 25]