Action, Revolution and Painting

Abstract

Expressionism, see Richard Shiff, 'Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism', Abstract Expressionism, The Critical Developments (1987), pp. 94-123. 60. See Richard Wollheim's account of Ur-painting in Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 19-25, p. 359, n. 9. 61. Rosenberg has a note here, '* Razkolnikov, for example, in Crime and Punishment soughtjudgment so that his act would be completed and he could take on a new existence'. 62. Here I had in mind something of what Alasdair Maclntyre writes in his conclusion to After Virtue, a study in moral theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 243-4: 'Here I was of course speaking of Marxists at their best in, say Yugoslavia or Italy; the barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow can be taken to be as irrelevant to the question of the moral substance of Marxism as the life of the Borgia pope was to that of the moral substance of Christianity. None the less Marxism has recommended itself precisely as a guide to practice, as a politics of a peculiarly illuminating kind. Yet it is just here that it has been of singularly little help for some time now. Trotsky, in the very last years of his life, facing the question of whether the Soviet Union was in any sense a socialist country, also faced implicitly the question of whether the categories of Marxism could illuminate the future. He himself made everything turn on the outcome of a set of hypothetical predictions about possible future events in the Soviet Union, predictions which were tested only after Trotsky's death. The answer that they returned was clear: Trotsky's own premises entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led into darkness. 'Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thorough-going its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? [.. .] 'A Marxist who took Troksky's last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. For I too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.' 63. N. B. Harold Rosenberg and Robert Motherwell, 'Possibilities', Possibilities, no. 1, Winter 1947-48, p. 1: 'If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him He must perhaps have the extremist faith in sheer possibility.' THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL 14:2 1991 17 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.128 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:32:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms