While we were in the city last week, we went to the Museum of Modern Art.  My daughter had expressed an interest in Andy Warhol (her seventh grade art teacher had brought his work to her attention) and I seized on the opportunity to walk through the two great floors of paintings at MoMA (and I should mention that this collection was significantly shaped by an alumnus of Williams, Kirk Varnedoe).  In any event, as I strolled through the story of the 20th century’s struggle with the deconstruction of the subject (that’s what’s it’s all about, really), I was reminded of a truism. 

     Chuang Tzu is an abstract expressionist.

     I know this sort of idea has been said before, perhaps to the point of cliche, but it struck me as I looked at this painting by Jackson Pollock:

      Here is the text from the gallery label:

Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock’s first "drip" paintings.
While its top layers consist of poured lines of black and shiny silver
house paint, a large part of the paint’s crust was applied by brush and
palette knife; the result is a labyrinthine web that reveals an
instantaneous unity between multiple crisscrossing and planar forms
with no contours. An assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to
coins and a key, are enfolded by the paint. Though many of these items
are obscured, they contribute to the painting’s dense surface and
churning sensation. The title, suggested by Pollock’s neighbor, quotes
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, wherein Ariel describes a death
by shipwreck: "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are
coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes."

 The randomness and spontaneity of the drip and splatter method leads to the discovery, or realization, of an underlying, or newly created yet always there, significance.  In some way, which I cannot really articulate at the moment, that strikes me as what Chuang Tzu is telling us.  I think of this passage, the opening of chapter two, which, while it discussing music of a sort, speaks to art and expression more generally:

"This Mighty Mudball of a world spews out breath, and that breath is called wind," began Adept Piebald.  "Everything is fine so long as it’s still.  But when it blows, the ten thousand things cry and moan.  Haven’t you heard them wailing on and on?  In the awesome beauty of mountain forests, it’s all huge trees a hundred feet around, and they’re full of wailing hollows and holes – like noses, like mouths, like ears, like posts and beams, like cups and bowls, like empty ditches and puddles: water-splashers, arrow-whistlers, howlers, gaspers, callers, screamers, laughers, warblers – leaders singing out yuuu! and followers answering yeee!   When the wind’s light, the harmony’s gentle; but when the storm wails, it’s a mighty chorus.  And then, once the fierce wind has passed through, the holes are empty again.  Haven’t you seen felicity and depravity thrashing and failing together?"

"So the music of earth means all those holes singing together," said Adept Adrift, "and the music of humans means bamboo pipes singing.  Could I ask you to explain the music of heaven for me?"

"Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself – who could make such music?"

      That last line strikes me as a description of abstract expressionism, the kind of project that Pollock had embraced.  And the sense of multiplicity and uncertainty and arbitrariness of composition, whether musical or visual, gets at Pollock’s method.  He never knew, at the outset, just what he would produce.  He had no definite "picture" in mind.  How could he?  Rather, he let the performance of the painting itself, the moment, produce its own lasting image.

     Also, visually, Pollock calls to mind the Yangzhou Eight Eccentrics, a group of seventeenth-eighteenth century Chinese painters and calligraphers known for their rejection of established conventions.  Some of their calligraphy is truly extraordinary, abstract to almost Pollock proportions.  I could not find the best examples on the web, but here is one image by Zheng Banqiao:

     I am not sure about the relationship between The Eight and Chuang Tzu.  They must have read him; whether they were consciously acting upon a Taoist impulse, I don’t know.  But the resonance is there, running from Chuang Tzu, to Yangzhou to MoMA:

    Sounding the ten thousand things differently, so each becomes itself according to itself…