examples will do. In Vincent van Gogh’s imagery literal Provençal fields begin to fuse with the outsider artist’s impasto brush marks. The former are mimetic, that is, depictive. The latter are tactile and, in themselves, abstract—that is, signifying touch and embodying pigment’s raw matter rather than resemblance. 6 Flash forward from fin-de-siècle France to mid-century America. Our attention should fasten upon Pollock and his fellow Abstract Expressionist soulmate Clyfford Still. Like Pollock, Still was an outsider and a Westerner. 7 Their singular tech- niques reconfigured into a fresh formulation what in Van Gogh and other European artists—such as J. M. W. Turner’s late landscapes and Claude Monet’s expansive Nymphéas murals—had formerly served representation. Namely, pictorial fields fusing the self’s traces with space, time and motion (each a non-representational phe- nomenon). Pollock’s fragmentary notes in late 1950 state: “Technic is the result of a need/new needs demand new technics…. States of order/ organic intensity/energy and motion made visible/ memories arrested in space.”
mean being and becoming are one?”, Jackson replied, “Exactly.” The equivalence with Hall is breathtaking: “When I paint, I am being and becoming.” 9 Time to catch our breaths with a few quick tweets before closure. To wit, although Pollock is a dead white male, he was also a multiculturalist well before multi- culturalism became mainstream. 10 Among various touchstones, Pollock identified with the Native American/First Nation sand painters of the West; dropped Christianity in favor of pan- theism; 11 and loved jazz. On the last point, Hall follows in Jackson’s footsteps (on a minor note, they both have adored pet dogs). Nor might it be fanciful to discern in Pollock’s traceries and Field Painting ’s buzzing, green-brown-white-blackish chromatic crossfire 12 certain beats reminiscent of the polyrhythms African music bequeathed to jazz. And both artists broke with conventional materials. In Pollock’s case, it was industrial enamel paints and supports ranging from lino- leum to pottery and glass. For Hall, coffee counts. The wheel has come full circle: back to identity. Coffee has a history, sometimes darker than the darkest roast. 13 In a nutshell (and only too aptly for the bitter seeds in question), coffee—like sugar, tobacco and cotton—is inseparable from slavery and the ghastly Triangular Trade. There’s an awful lot of coffee in Brazil—but even more people of color around the globe since the seven- teenth century or earlier whose harsh labors have brought the booty to colonial and then corporate capitalism’s cups. Behind the Starbuck mermaid or siren, 14 lurk stark historical exploitation and tragedy. Turning the coffee tables, Hall exploits this bitter-sweet medium to create tapestried tableaux that give a whole new meaning to the kaffeeklatsch. In short, Hall employs liquid coffee to inscribe signs of difference or alterity—call otherness what you will. In his semiotics (Barthes, intriguingly, was a supreme semiotician too), coffee’s various tints and shades—rustled up from a filter drip, stovetop or an espresso machine—denote corre- sponding existential states. On the one hand, slavery’s exhaustion. On the other, this psychoac- tive drug’s commodification 15 in a zillion everyday wakeup caffeine swigs. Now Field Painting ’s full complexity surfaces.
Vincent van Gogh, Enclosed Wheat Field with Peasant / Landscape at Saint-Rémy , 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 × 36.2 in. Gift of Mrs. James W Fesler in memory of Daniel W. and Elizabeth C. Marmon
In studying Pollock’s feather-light filigree seen, for instance, in the Untitled 1951 ink on paper composition, it seems to transport us into the rhythms of the artist’s bodily dynamism. The lightning-quick flicks dance, intermingle and flit like memories flung to the winds—a nervous system, as it were, suspended in space. No wonder Pollock considered painting “a state of being,” the mind made manifest through mercu- rial lines. 8 Questioned about his intentions, “You
Pollock chose raw canvas to allow his enamels to bond with their ground in an optical dance. Hall’s
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