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Thrown Down Glyphs

The ‘modest’ aesthetic imagined by Olson and his contemporaries, critical of abstract or scientific reason, is seen in the fourth chapter to have found expression in a second major formal development. The chapter begins by asking why pictographic or ideographic writing emerged so strongly in American visual art between 1943 and 1951. Turning to the ‘sign which refuses to signify’ (Ad Reinhardt), American artists—including Olson, Pollock, Gottlieb, Lee Krasner, and the photographer Aaron Siskind—are shown to have found a language which reflected their critique of both scientific reason and those political languages (especially Marxism) which had failed to account for historical contingency. The avant-garde is seen to have valued the glyph, pictogram, or ideograph for its ‘uncertainty’; a major theme in Olson’s work of the period.