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...modern and contemporary gallery of the Fogg. Or perhaps “painting” is too strong a word. The 2001 work, Dorian Gray by the American artist Martin Kline, at first glance looks remarkably like a gigantic black mud splat. Kline used encaustic, a pasty wax-based paint, to make this work, and the result is a highly textured oval mound of pigment, roughly the shape and convexity of a shield, that juts forward close to three inches from the center of the board. The board itself is a vertically-oriented rectangle (roughtly three feet by four feet...
...base materialism is indeed Pollock’s most important legacy to younger artists, then in Kline’s case we can certainly say that the pupil has surpassed the master. Looking at a Pollock, you might be vaugely disturbed by it’s aggressive materiality, but looking at Kline, I have to say I was positively repulsed. There is something uncannily biological about the pattern of deep crevices and protruding nubs of encaustic that build up its mounded surface. It reminds me of a giant fungus-—if I reached out and touched...
...felt that Kline hadn’t beaten Pollock, he had simply outshouted him. He had taken one appealing aspect of Pollock’s painting—its base materiality—and excessively amplified it. And I think this kind of one-upsmanship is especially dangerous when it comes to base materiality or any similar strategy specifically designed to provoke a strong visceral response from the viewer. The problem is not that these strategies don’t suceed, but rather that they suceed far too well. At a certain point I think the visceral-reaction-inducing qualities...
...really spoiled Pollock for me, and that to think so was merely the symptom of overly dogmatic thinking on my part. After all, Kline could only really spoil Pollock if they existed as two competing entities on the same spectrum of a single quality (in this case, base materiality). But of course the relationship between two works of art, let alone the works themselves, are never actually that simple. And indeed, on my next visit the Pollock no longer looked boring compared to the Kline, but refreshingly spare, more delicate and calligraphic than I remembered. Looking back at the Kline...
...Unknowns’ lax attitude towards self-promotion and development of a fan base is evident even today—Warren was painfully cautious about asking for fan e-mail addresses, apologizing by saying that she felt “sleazy” and “like [she] was coming onto the audience” by soliciting information...