Kaprow's "Impurity": a theoretical stain?

Invoking the works of Modernists Mondrain, Stout, Pollock and Newman, Kaprow attempts to classify Modernist agendas through the lens of purity/impurity. As Kaprow reasons, the functional language of Modern art is vast; the purity/impurity binary should suffice to sustain “an adequate critical language” (27), or so he proposes. The fundamental problem of the purity/impurity dichotomy, as Kaprow himself admits, is one that is semantic. Firstly, the purity/impurity complex is one that is not dichotomous. Rather, their relationship is one that is intertwined and inter-informed:

“The two ideas involve one another, one takes its meaning from the implicit denial of the other, and neither can exist in fact without invoking the shades of its opponent.” (28)

Kaprow draws reference to an advent of interest in Eastern philosophy, and it is easy to see how Han dynastic conceptions of yin-yang polar opposites consume and support each other the way the impure/pure paradox is developed. In this essential conceptual paradox, it therefore follows that neither purity nor impurity are pure idea-manifestations of themselves. The proposed “pure” in Modernist art must therefore always be interpreted against the background (or the present-void-of) its binary opposite (and vice versa).

Secondly, the pure/impure complex is one that is epistemological, and therefore almost nearly relativistic. Kaprow’s lengthy discussion of the attributes of the pure and impure is worryingly sensuous, and therefore individual. His allegories of “pure” to related concepts such as “uncontaminated … unweakened … formal … chastity … cleanliness … [etc.]” (28) suggest a very personal episteme of the pure/impure binary; flimsy structures that recall instable concepts of “beauty” and “romanticism”. It is the assumption of the latter that is perhaps most dangerously condemning, and it continues throughout his essay unchecked. Ultimately what surfaces is a very personal reading of a set of works artfully placed together by virtue of the author’s choice in order to enlighten the reader with his set of discoveries through careful rhetoric.

Kaprow attempts to reinforce his assertions through careful selections from an expansive canon of Modernist Art, both “Classical” (if I may permit myself to use the term), and works produced nearer to the time of the article’s print. It seems that Kaprow invites us to use our intuitive devices to fathom works of arts, and apparently come to the same distant conclusions of an eloquent erudite. In the case of Barnett Newman, Kaprow cuts through the thick of Barnett’s critics, persuading us to view his works with “reasoning [that] is more intuitive…” (40) rather than “historical and analytic”. Two further problems arise from that proposition with regard to Newman.
Firstly, Kaprow’s reading of Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51) indicates a sense of presentational unity through its alignment to the impure/pure paradox, comprised of “unequal but equivalent forces.” (43) However, the viewer, devoid of the pure/impure paradigm, might just as easily bypass Kaprow’s esoteric interpretation of equivalent artistic tensions. In fact, Kaprow’s own elucidation of the nature of Newman’s work incorporates several interpretive swerve points that deflect from numerous possible interpretive paths a viewer might chose to take. Here Kaprow also makes an assumption regarding the status of his imagined viewer, imagining him as one that is steeped in the traditions of art in order to appreciate the pure/impure complex. Furthermore, one may also propose that Kaprow’s own exposition about the interconnectivity of binary opposites collapses in his own argument at this point, since there is a secondary-order binary opposite: that of the [pure/impure] binary versus the [other established forms of critical reasoning]. Each informs the other, and hence Kaprow’s own evaluations cannot be attained by the lay-spectator without having grasped one polar end of the secondary binary.

This, in turn, points to a second problem: the implicit (hidden) necessity for precisely the “historic and analytic” paradigms of which Kaprow suggests sidestepping. The “historic” and the “intuitive”, therefore, inflect off each other in a process which Kaprow tries to hint at, but fails to acknowledge fully. In outlining the very process of “seeing art”, Kaprow describes the necessary:

“[S]low march of … [the viewer’s] eyes and body before the canvas. The accent is really on our sensations.” (43)

However, the real accent is on the act of our senses encountering Newman’s work. In actuality, Kaprow’s observations are primarily phenomenological in nature without him fully acknowledging it. His insights into ways of looking at a work of art is largely centred about how the limited faculties of human subjects try to accommodate the alien phenomenon of “art” that is present before them, and how their other faculties (memory, knowledge, experience…etc) serve to inform, inflect or manipulate that conjugative experience. The “meaning of the work” (43) of which Kaprow speaks of, is therefore dependent entirely upon the condition of reception.

Once the condition of phenomenology is made central, we can therefore speak of the Modern in Art as an invitation to new ways of “seeing”. Inevitably, one work of art will relate to the next; one’s subconscious faculties search for meaning through repetition, memory, mimesis et al. To Kaprow, simply glancing is not enough to absorb a work. The aesthetic experience involves contemplation that navigates between the pure/impure fissures. In observing “everything that is not immobilized” (31) in Piet Mondrain’s Composition 2 (1922), the fissure yields a “tabula rasa” and an aesthetic experience that serves to further alienate the “pure” through the “impurity” of the viewer (i.e. his limited faculties). In Myron S. Stout’s Untitled (No. 3) (1956), the immediacy of his shapes widen Mondrain’s art-pure, viewer-impure divide. In Jackson Pollock’s compositions, pure/impure rhythms are sustained through visual unity and a sensation of controlled equilibrium between explosive and implosive forces. In Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, purity and impurity play off each other to create a homogenous composition.

As a primer, the pure/impure binary system can do no further than highlight material elements in a work. On a phenomenological level, however, it is up to the viewer to construct the levels of meaning on which he is willing to operate and view the art. Without rigorously acknowledging this basic paradox, Kaprow opens himself up to an eternal free-play of interpretation, and his developed insights reveal themselves to be no more than inspired discourse based on cataleptic sensations.