The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured

Abstract

And savage action paintings hanging patient on the walls. What can a painting do?1Harold Rosenberg asked this question in one of the many notebook pages he filled addressing the central theme of his intellectual life: namely, the concept of action. In the same passage, the critic declared that the ‘Spirit of Action Painting’ was ‘summed up’ by Claes Oldenburg's statement, ‘I am for an art … that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum’.2 Yet, by the end of the 1960s, when Rosenberg wrote these words and was in the midst of preparing a manuscript on his signature idea, the agency of painting seemed especially endangered (as opposed to the more general ‘art’ espoused by Oldenburg, a term that had come to encompass such categorically dynamic practices as happenings, performance, and the flow of information). If the question of art's social relevancy, let alone agency, became critical amidst the political and social upheavals of the 1960s, it was painting in particular, with its traditional connotations and its deep-seated representational functions that seemed most obsolete and impotent, the most likely to ‘sit on its ass in a museum’.