Clyfford Still makes the rest of us look academic.

Jackson Pollock

I reiterate: If you want to see the world aright, you need to get in mimetic touch with that that is different from you, you need to embrace the other. By permanently and consecutively embracing the different, the other, your vision will become more and more complete, your vision will become more and more one. There will be no more internal stratification inside you, just an open field (with, to be true, largely heterogenous elements, yet their boundaries will become fuzzy and blurred, i.e. open for interaction). E pluribus unum, or so they say. Clyfford Still was very different, very otherwise. Clyfford Still stands in the corner of another room, enigmatically. It is not easy to decipher what such a figure actually wants to say, it does not directly communicate; it is vibrating and humming in itself, obviously it is alive, but most obviously it is something different from us and from anything we commonly know. Clyfford Still is very original and very different, very unlike anything we know. Maybe it is us who are different – and forsaken – , and he is the one more close to the Real Thing, to the real Real. Or so we might think. Jackson Pollock said, Clyfford Still made the rest of the American painters look academic. He was a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism, developed his “style” in reclusiveness, and he disliked Abstract Expressionism once it had become fashionable, and, as he saw it, sterile and formulaic. So he withdrew from the scene. Ideally, Still´s largely monochromous paintings contain flame-like, wedge-like or eye-like elements that shake up the silence of the undifferentiated primal ground, but add another silence into it, or a language that mumbles, partly comprehensibly, partly unintelligibly. They are the (relative) silence of Otherness, the enigma of Otherness. While the other Abstract Expressionists come up with something vivid, or Barnett Newman comes up with a flashing Zip, out of Clyfford Still´s primal ground emerges some primal, originary Otherness. Silent, though not mute, reclusive. An all-over eye, that seems to envision the entire scene and its beyond. It is face-like, like the paintings of another one who was a radical Other: Wols. The paintings by Wols and by Clyfford Still are like faces of Otherness. We gaze into them, they gaze into us. In some way we do meet, in some other way we don´t. Very different, very otherwise, all that. What is striking is the in-your-face character of these painted faces, of the paintings both by Wols and by Still. They come unfiltered and unmitigated. The poststructuralists (Derrida) say that presence does not exist, but the paintings by Clyfford Still and by Wols are of an unmistakable presence. They seem to be presence itself. They shake up poststructuralism. They confront any systems of meaning with some strange, evasive super-meaning; or with an ultra-meaning and an infra-meaning. They are an extension to ordinary meaning. Clyfford Still probably was the best abstract painter who ever existed (or, upon reflection, Mondrian might have been). Yet, maybe therefore, he is not, or cannot be, a household name like Pollock, Rothko or de Kooning. There seems to be an additional level of abstraction to his paintings; in his paintings there seems to be a meta-level of abstraction and Abstract Expressionism. This is what the ordinary eye cannot truly bear: the eye of radical Otherness, the faces of radical Otherness. The art of Clyfford Still exemplifies radical Otherness.

Concerning Lacan´s “Great Other”, I do not know how individuals like Clyfford Still could be intimidated by the uncanny complexity and intransparency of any “Great Other”. Rather, it will be them who intimidate any other Great Other. If we take the “Great Other” to be language, customs, artistic styles – in the final instance: God – i.e. stuff that preforms and predetermines the individual and its modes of thought and expression, then individuals like Clyfford Still function in some way as the register of the Real to the Symbolic register that holds the Great Other. I.e. they are what evades the register of the Symbolic and predetermined language and modes of expression. They are something else. They are the Great Other to the Great Other. They are originary, and they seem to be primary to the register of the Symbolic (or, they seem to be an uncanny return of the Symbolic that has digested itself and now confronts the Symbolic that is still in place with the radical alterity that lies (not only) within the Symbolic (but in all the registers) – so, in some way they are near to the closure of the entire system of the registers). Lacan says the Great Other is barred. Although we may be inclined to think so, the Great Other is not complete and not identical to itself, just as we aren´t. The Great Other is barred. This kind of non-identity you seem to have in the art of Clyfford Still as well. But this non-identity seems to be much more natural and identical to itself, not as helpless as the non-identity in the Great Other, or inside us, whose non-identity evolves out of our inability to come to terms with ourselves. This is so because otherness is the inherent nature of it, and of such individuals who serve as the Great Other to the Great Other. Their otherness and alterity is primary. They are their own Great Other. They embody their own alterity, they are the embodiment of alterity. They are in natural touch with the other – and therefore with the entire universe. The common categories are: the self and the non-self (the other). But inside them, the self and the other are not separated. (You gotta keep em separated, sing The Offspring. But such individuals, who serve as Great Others to the Great Others, they do not.) Frank Stella says that Clyfford Still´s art seems to come effortless, originating from another place. In this effortlessness, it is unlike any other painting, and Clyfford Still is unlike any other painter. Clyfford Still himself says, in his paintings there should be expressed the amalgamation between life and death. What could be more different, more otherwise to each other than life and death? In the paintings of Clyfford Still you gaze into radical alterity, into radical Otherness.