The Aesthetics of Area Bombing (I)

" So-called strategic bombing, or area bombing of cities with the aim of killing or disabling the employees of war industries and destroying civilian morale -as opposed to attacking industrial targets directly- was a central strategy of the Allied air forces during World War II" (...) Postwar plans (...) relied on general attacks against cities and assumed that Hiroshima-like devastation would lead automatically to the enemy's surrender. Nuclear weapons, which unavoidable destroyed everything within mikes of ground zero, fit perfectly into this strategic doctrine. Almost without debate, city bombing became the nuclear strategic policy of the new air force" (Edwards 83). Note; Do research on the political rationale behind terrorism target of civilians.

It is impossible that Rothko and Pollock had escaped the mental conditioning brought about by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. What concerns us here is the conscious adoption of nuclear bombing iconography in the work of this two abstract expressionism titans.
Besides nuclear annihilation, the second major issue of the Cold War era, one that last until today, is the obsession with check and control of the destructive forces brought about by science and technology.

These two artistic examples are a metaphoric representation of both the entropic power of nuclear explosion and of control. Rothko's painting is more clear in the expression of these concerns. The way figure and background are set, the conception of the space and the distribution of the masses are strikingly similar to the formal characteristic of the H-Bomb picture. The elements are distributed as fireball (red area) and mushroom cloud (gray ares) against an atmospheric radioactive background. These elements are contained and forced into a cubic shape; the destructive force of atomic fission acquire clarity, equilibrium, rationality and temperance. Man triumphs over the destructive power of the energies of nature, which he can nurture and unleash like a trained pit bull ready for the fight.

In the case of Jackson Pollock's painting the focus is on the blast and the moment of the frenetic liberation of physical energy. The energy comes from a center, a nucleus that expands in the form of a sphere that is not controlled but that is subjected to the capacity of chaotic and destructive power of the atoms itself. They are also set against a background but which is separated from the figure, not radioactive but contemplative of electrons, protons and neutrons orbiting with a life of their own. The scare is bigger and the capacity to control energy is not so clear. Dionysus getting the upper hand over Apollo. (will continue).

Nuclear weapons effects

So far I have found nothing "incriminating" that would find Rothko and Pollock guilty of aestheticizing destruction. In the unlikely event that I would find some evidence I would absolve them based in the criteria that true art is amoral. Good or evil, right or wrong are in the mind of the beholder and is up to him or her to make moral judgments (beware of aesthetics and remember Goebbels words about culture).

The only thing so far I have found, in Rothko, that I can use to trace a link between nuclear detonation and control comes from a sentence in "The Romantics were Prompted...". Talking about shapes Rothko says that "They have no direct association with any particular experience, but in them one recognize the principle and passion of organisms" (Harrison&Wood 572).

Let's go back way in time and we will see that " by the early part of the nineteenth century, organization, or the pattern of relationships binding the organs together and integrating their individual function into a coordinated whole, was a privileged term, designating at lest one condition for the possibility of life itself. Such an attentiveness to the integration of structure and function within the organism was subsequently extended to the organism's relation with Auguste Comte called its milieu, or environment. And with the work of psychologist Claude Bernard, the notion of the milieu interieur, or interior environment, was introduced to describe the internal space in which the regulatory functions of organisms are performed. The resulting tripartite assemblage -structure, function, environment- came to define the regulatory process of organized (and thereby organic) bodies conceived as internal combustion engines" (Martin 17).

The implication of the paragraph above is that from the early nineteenth century bodies were being conceived as machines. Combustion engines interacting with the environment in a process of stimulus-response, action-reaction; with the goal of reaching what Giedion called "'dinamic equilibrium', a balanced state of flux and interchange between individual and environment. It's prime agent, according to Giedion, is to be a new human type, a 'man in equipoise', capable of balancing irreconcilable forces" (Ibid 20).

A balanced state between the conquering individual and the forces of nature requires control and command. In 1948 Norbert Wiener published "Cybernetics"; in it " Extending concepts originating in nineteenth-century thermodynamics into systems of information measurement and management, Wiener defines information in relation to its opposite, entropy" (Ibid 21).

I may be stretching too much the point that Rothko had cybernetics, entropy and homeostasis in his mind when he was making the series of canvases for which he is celebrated today. Nevertheless, Rothko mature abstract paintings of symmetrical rectangle blocks appeared in 1949, roughly a year after Wiener's "Cybernetics" went public.

Whether these associations are grounded in facts or in paranoia I cannot help but think that Rothko's paintings are obsessed with organization, control, homeostasis and equilibrium. I don't have to be paranoid to see that; anyone can see it.

Pollock's obsession has not to do with controlling destruction but with liberating it. In Pollock, destruction is a creative force and he is at the center of it; opening up the source of energies that give birth to the universe. His mind-hand coordination is the atom splitting and liberating energy, not containing it as Rothko does, but unleashing it in all its might.

In an interview that Pollock gave to William Wright for the Sag Harbor radio station, Pollock shows awareness that he cannot scape the dynamics of science and technology and its interconnections with power, politics and ideology. In it he says that "the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Reinassance or of any other past culture." He also talks about the modern artist "working and expressing an inner world -in other worlds- expressing the energy, the motion and other inner forces." About control (I'm not contradicting myself since, of course, there is control in Pollock but is not a control from the outset, not panopticon control but control from the inside, self-control) "It seems to be possible to control the flow of the paint" (Harrison&Wood 583-585). Pollock is energy himself.

Works Cited:

Edward, Paul N. The Closed Worlds. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1996.

Martin, Reinhold. The Organizational Complex. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2003.

Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul. Art in Theory. 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, MA. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.