Lousy Revolutionaries: Fiction, Feminism, and Failure in Ilene Segalove’s The Riot Tapes (1984)

Abstract

There is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now. You can’t get away from it. Eugene O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten1 In Ilene Segalove’s 1974 collage work Today’s Program: Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950 (Fig. 1), the passengers of an airline cabin gaze in rapt attention at an Abstract Expressionist painting that takes the place of the usual drop-down in-flight movie screen. Avant-garde art is inserted into the realm of popular culture, granted the acquiescent spectatorship of a captive audience trapped in their seats. The notion that they will continue to gaze at the painting for the duration of the flight is absurd: as John Miller has noted, ‘Nobody looks at a painting like that, no matter how good it is’.2 On one level, the collage deploys that absurdity in the service of dismantling the still-lingering authority of Abstract Expressionism, the heroic individualism of which collides with the collectivity of mass cultural consumption in the era of the society of the spectacle. In cropping Pollock’s painting to fit the space of the screen, the collage also enacts the neat art historical teleology that leads from Abstract Expressionism’s expansive gestures to the contained surfaces of Pop. As such, it raises familiar questions about the limits of painting and popular culture alike, the politics of spectatorial attention and responsibility, and the role of art in the context of the everyday, made manifest in the high art object trimmed to fit its quotidian surroundings.