A Face in the Field

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 “conversation” involves wide divisions across time, generations, 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 something 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 portrays an Arkansas drifter ironically named Lonesome 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 VHSs 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, “consequently 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.” Darkness, 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 boundaries 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 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 techniques 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 phenomenon). 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.”

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 mercurial lines.⁸ Questioned about his intentions, “You 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 crossfire¹² 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 linoleum 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 seventeenth 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 corresponding existential states. On the one hand, slavery’s exhaustion. On the other, this psychoactive drug’s commodification¹⁵ in a zillion everyday wakeup caffeine swigs. Now Field Painting’s full complexity surfaces.

Pollock chose raw canvas to allow his enamels to bond with their ground in an optical dance. Hall’s 12 oz. army cotton duck canvas signals whiteness’s shifty guises. By weaponizing coffee and cotton, he interrogates those associations. Field Painting’s vibrant greens in juicy acrylic impasto convey an almost Joan Mitchell-like joy in nature. By contrast, notice how the coffee’s thinness embeds itself into the weave as shadowy stains.¹⁶ The gamut of touches looks tantamount to camouflage.¹⁷ A forested game of hide-and-seek surrounding a full-on gaze that might bespeak a prisoner, a nature boy or Everyman. White underneath haunts mocha above, emphasizing in-betweenness. Neither quite wins. A quick fact completes this artful intrigue.

Hall has a blond white mother and a Black father. And I, for one, think he is right to champion “mixedness”¹⁸: “I didn’t want my work to just be about Blackness. I wanted to bring all of me into the picture.” As in nature, so in culture and vice-versa (Barthes said we tend to confuse them¹⁹). Both domains offer myriad examples of how a rich mix often yields strength, diversity and newness. Remember Charles Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” the statement with which he closed an epic celebration of life on earth, Origin of Species (1859)? By comparison, the dark twentieth century proved far too many times that “purity”—though such an absolute might be fine for vodka, diamonds, horses and Clement Greenberg’s modernist flat color fields—can lead to disastrous human ends.²⁰ Instead, hooray for hybrids!

The second presentation of A Lover’s Discourse featured Chase Hall in the company of Jackson Pollock at the Aspen Art Museum from July 27–August 27, 2023. Read more about the exhibition here.

David Anfam (1955–2024) was a writer, curator and leading authority on modern American art.

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Endnotes

1. Pollock (c. 1956), in Helen A. Harrison ed.,Such Desperate Joy: Imagining JacksonPollock (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,2000), p. 54. As befits a concise brochure,these notes are streamlined. After a firstcitation appears, the source does not repeat.Interested readers can further peruse saidscholarly leads at their leisure.

2. Hall, in Dodie Kazanjian, “The AwesomeAudacity of Chase Hall,” Vogue.com (July 14,2022).

3. Pollock (1947/48), in Pepe Karmel, ed.,Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, andReviews (New York: The Museum of ModernArt, 1999), p. 17.

4. Note, in passing, that Pollock’s and Hall’schildhoods were alike peripatetic.

5. The Czech-British film director Karel Reiszmentioned “its attack on the jungle values”of American television. Does the phrase hintat a twist on the racist dimension toAmerican culture?

6. On the genesis and evolution of the mark(“tache” in French), see Øystein Sjåstad, ATheory of the Tache in Nineteenth-CenturyPainting (London: Routledge, 2019).

7. For Clyfford Still’s manifold fields anddeep engagement with Van Gogh, see DavidAnfam, “Still’s Journey,” in Dean Sobel andAnfam, Clyfford Still—The Artist’s Museum(New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012), pp. 57–112.

8. Anfam, “Pollock Drawing: The Mind’sLine,” in No Limits, Just Edges: JacksonPollock—Paintings on Paper (New York: TheSolomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2005).

9. Hall, in Antwaun Sargent, “TroubledWaters: Meet Painter Chase Hall. OnBlackness Beyond White Imagination,”SSense.com (October 6, 2020).

10. Mindful of today’s preoccupation withgender, the word was already out someyears ago that Pollock was non-binary. SeeSteven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith,Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (NewYork: Harper Perennial, 1989).

11. Pollock: “Fuck all the God shit! Way I seeit, we’re part of the one, making it whole.”

12. I choose the word carefully. Crossfire(dir. Edward Dmytryk; 1947) is a film noirthat dealt daringly with anti-Semitism, i.e.,racism.

13. By coincidence, I cannot helpremembering my unintentionally savvyshtick when unexpectedly confronted with abillionaire’s fake Pollock: “It has a history.”

14. For a while Hall worked for the multi-national coffee shop chain.

15. Hall, in Emma Leigh Macdonald, “ChaseHall’s Artworks Closely Consider Life’s GrayAreas,” WMag.com (March 7, 2022).

16. The coffee takes longer to dry—almosttwenty-four hours—changing in the process.For this and many another helping hand atthe eleventh hour, I thank Chase Hall.

17. Here Hall approaches the venerable tropeof the Black trickster and his/her invisibility.See Anfam, “The Music of Invisibility,” inNorman Lewis: Pulse. A CentennialExhibition (New York: Michael RosenfeldGallery, 2009).

18. True, on this score I am not altogetherobjective. With an extended family tree thatencompasses Cockney, Irish, Jewish andAfrican members, how could I be?

19. Roland Barthes, transl. Annette Lavers,Mythologies (London: Vintage, [1957], 1972).Another corollary here is the venerable racistassociation of Blacks with nature and thatof their white overlords with “civilization.”

20. After all, even thoroughbred horsesdeveloped from crossbreeds.

© Art Exploration Consultancy Ltd. 2023