Emotional Depth

In his essay, "Notes on Surface," David Joselit discusses the prevalence of "flatness" from modernism to postmodernism in art. He surveys the works of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Kara Walker, among others, to illustrate the various manifestations and effects of flatness in postmodernism. He begins with Pollock, which is interesting, as his work is flat in perhaps the most conceptual way, physically three dimensional through "'reverse-depth': a literal building-out from the picture plane rather than an illusionist recession beyond it" (Joselit 294). He them moves to a piece by Johns titled "Skin," which, while never realized, used a technique involving oil and charcoal to effectively unwrap the textures of his skin onto flat sheets of paper. He finishes by looking at the work of Kara Walker, which is completely flat, lacking any physical depth or illusionistic depth, as it is simply silhouetted cut-outs. The paper is flat and there is no attempt to mimic any depth with linework or pigment, as we are used to.

We can see that he is observing "flatness" so broadly that it almost becomes simply a play on the word, rather than actual trends in the art world, especially considering the limited scope of artists he discusses. He states while looking into Pollock that the visual flatness of the images (really, simply the refrain from attempt at representation, rather than flatness) is not only legitimated, but is controlled by the unconscious of the artist, creating "emotional depth" that strikes the unconscious of the viewer. Joselit tries to apply the same idea of the unconscious being revealed in in Johns's "Study for Skin," but only through completely convoluted logic regarding a Freudian metaphor of the "mystic writing-pad" being likened to consciousness: "... in the realm of consciousness, one perception follows another, each fading away in order to make room for the next, while in an underlying register of the unconscious this chain of ephemeral conscious stimuli lays down lasting memory traces" (Joselit 300). He ultimately states that "in Freud's allegory, perception leaves an unconscious or preconscious trace, but in Johns's version, such invisible or inaccessible marks are recuperated through the gestural application of medium... Johns, like Pollock, had invented an art of surfaces in which the body and its unconscious are articulated in a distinctively disciplinary fashion" (Joselit 300). Finding a link between Johns's technique and this Freudian metaphor, however, doesn't alter the nature of the work, though. Pollock's paintings could very well be a manifestation of the unconscious, as he states himself that he is expressing himself through the process rather than illustrating his feelings (Joselit 294), but what Johns is presenting is simply an unrolled representation of his skin. Any emotional depth that results from this process is through accidental representation of the paper pulled tightly over the skin, making it look trapped, and while this could metaphorically represent the contrary of Foucault's statement of the soul being the body's cage, I stress again that it is simply accidental and metaphorical. No true emotion is present in the process, and there is no link between the product and the artist's unconscious.

Joselit, David. "Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness." Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 292-308.