A Lover’s Discourse
` July 27–August 27, 2023
Chase Hall & Jackson Pollock
A Face in the Field Dr. David Anfam
If absence proverbially makes the heart grow fonder, intimacy can also cause it to turn stranger. These thoughts stem from the French writer Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments — a radical text whose suggestive spirit informs the current series of six presentations that juxtapose rising art stars with far more established names. Of course, Chase Hall features here alongside Jackson Pollock. At first glance, the “conversa- tion” involves wide divisions across time, genera- tions, ethnicity, artistic techniques and ideas. But not just divisions. Connections too. In what way? For a start, Pollock’s premise: “Painting is self- discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” 1 These words from another century resonate in the present context since selfhood is at stake. In art, as in life, notions about the self come, change, go and return throughout history. For Pollock, painting was nothing less than “a state of being,” an existential stance that Hall admires. For Barthes, the self pivots on the loved other, its mingled presence and absence, reciprocity and loss. Overall, then, a single factor triangulates these three otherwise completely different figures: identity. To date, Hall’s creative arc reflects a quest to discover himself. Consider, now, where this search intersects with his white predecessor from Cody, Wyoming. Firstly, like Hall, Pollock was an autodidact. He claimed: “I can read by sensing a book—I get what it’s saying.” Last year, Hall painted The Autodidact . That alter ego seems to intuit some- thing by touching a book stack. From my own experience (having gone profoundly deaf as a child), I know that learning alone amounts to self-discovery. Similarly, Hall: “I wanted it [my work] to bring all of me into the picture.” 2 Perhaps he is always somewhere in the pictures? If so, Hall echoes Pollock’s motive for laying his canvases down flat: “On the floor I am more at ease…. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting and [can] literally be in the painting.” 3 Enter, center stage, Hall’s Field Painting . Manifestly,
it treats the human factor deep in the field. A face, so to speak, in the painterly crowd of innumerable brushmarks. My allusion is to the film A Face in the Crowd (dir. Elia Kazan, 1957). The saga por- trays an Arkansas drifter ironically named Lone- some Rhodes, 4 who rises to fame on national TV. Again, the isolated self versus the many. 5 This situation invites further parallels with Pollock’s world. Growing up as an almost-Black youth (the “almost” is key) in a white society, even at the millennium Hall experienced the usual racism. Take an anecdote. Hall loved TV cartoons: “I had VHSes of The Lion King and Snow White and The Sword in the Stone , anything about a hero’s journey.” However, the fun had a flip side. “Why is that little Black character being laughed at while he’s being run over by the wagon and Arthur with the blue eyes and blond hair has the Excalibur sword? I’d be like, Wait. I don’t look like Arthur. I look like the guy who’s being laughed at.” Barthes explores the same emotions—attraction, yearning and loss—in an utterly dissimilar setting. By chance, Pollock anticipates both. Early on, Pollock realized his predicament. A loner. “People have always frightened and bored me,” he wrote to his two brothers in 1929, “conse- quently I have been within my own shell,” and later added, “the more I read and the more I think I am thinking the darker things become.” Dark- ness, from which we instinctively tend to recoil, portends night’s blackness. Not long after these confessions, whom did Pollock depict? In at least two mid-1930s compositions he blurred boundar- ies and chose Black cotton pickers laboring in their fields. The faces are hidden; their clothes mingle white with the muddy colors of the land on which they toil. Serendipitously, therefore, Field Painting has distant ancestors except for its crux – the full-face, central countenance.
Fields possess a vast significance in modern American art and its European forebears. A few
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