Brushstrokes as gestures
In traditional figurative painting, brushstrokes (the acts) are made to conceal themselves: while a brushstroke on a canvas (i.e., the mark) is known by everyone to be the imprint of a bodily action, it is not meant to be looked at, but only seen as part of an image of something, not as an index of painterly action. When our gaze falls on an image, painted, gestured, or otherwise, we see it twofold: we see what it shows, and we see it as an object (Wollheim Reference Wollheim1987), but what matters is what it communicates, what it shows. This tradition of painting was eventually subverted by artists such as van Gogh, whose brushstrokes came to be seen as imprints of mood, of anxiety or anger, and did not hide, but rather exhibited at the surface, by its tactile features, the actions by which they had been made. We see van Gogh’s brushstrokes both iconically (as clouds, wheat stalks, crows) and indexically, as marks of the painter’s actions, which appear to have been driven by psychic forces.
Abstract Expressionist painters endeavored to ban any reference to the outside world, any figuration, from the canvas. What particularly the New York School painters explored were the kinetic and communicative equivalences between gestures and brushstrokes as physical acts, and they regarded gestures, and thus their painterly actions in the “gesture field,” as spontaneously expressive activity. The distribution and thickness of the paint on the canvas thus had to be seen as a sign—and made to appear as a natural or primal sign (Cernuschi Reference Cernuschi1992)—of the painter’s impulsive motor acts. New techniques were thus being developed to transcend the limits of, and enliven, a medium that arrests time.
Richard Shiff (Shiff Reference Shiff and Auping1987, Reference Shiff1991, Reference Shiff2011) has explained the difference between traditional (iconic) and modern (indexical) modes of painting in terms of transparency and opacity:
Modernist painting speaks a language of surface. … The modernist interpretive gesture … is to take marks ‘literally’, as actual physical imprints or impressions. … An indexical sign works by ‘representing’ or indicating the physical process that brought it into being. … The indexical relationship corresponds to the immediate contact of touch or handling (Shiff Reference Shiff and Auping1987, 98).
What the viewer is invited to see in the patterns of paint, of lines and colors, on the canvas was not the visible world, but marks of the dynamic, tactile, creative, abstractly expressive, free actions of the artist. Abstract Expressionism, like Bebop, was celebrated as an assertion of freedom from convention, and of the autonomy of artistic expression, an icon of the Free World (Menand Reference Menand2021) and its “culture of spontaneity” (Belgrad Reference Belgrad1998).
In the following, I analyze episodes from a videotaped conversation that I had in 1992 with a German art-historian, Christian Schneegass, who was at the time Secretary of the Division of Visual Arts at the Akademie der Künste in West Berlin. He depicts and interprets works by Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock and their production process. Schneegass (CS) is seated on a sofa in his living room. On the walls, we see sketches that document his own experimentation with écriture automatique (Michaux Reference Michaux1954).Footnote 1 I examine the two episodes gesture by gesture, focusing on their sensory features, their shifting references, the resources they draw upon, and, especially, their development over time. I will revisit the improvisational practices that the art-historian deploys at the end of the article, after situating Abstract Expressionism’s understanding of gesture in the context of gesture ideology.
My analysis of the art-historian’s gestures is informed by a typology that distinguishes between indexical or “environmentally coupled” gestures (Goodwin Reference Goodwin, Duncan, Cassell and Levy2007; Streeck Reference Streeck1996), among them pointing gestures; depiction; conceptual gestures (giving kinesthetic-visible form to an idea); metapragmatic; and transactional gestures such as greetings (see Streeck Reference Streeck2009, Reference Streeck and Streeck2010). Depictive and conceptual gesturing is often lumped together under the term “iconic,” but these modes differ in their communicative ecology and function (depictive gestures invite and require recipient visual attention, conceptual gestures do not; Streeck Reference Streeck1993).
A gestural eruption: Franz Kline
Franz Kline’s (1910–1962) paintingsFootnote 2 have been described as “gestural black-and-white canvases” (Everitt Reference Everitt1975, 35), as “free-standing black gestures” resulting from a “gestural eruption” (see below), and an exhibition of his work was entitled The Vital Gesture (Gaugh Reference Gaugh1985). The paintings
explode before us at a point-blank range permitting no distance. It is a confrontation entirely visual in its immediacy, so strong as to be all absorbing, and creating a dialogue between work and spectator as at first to permit no thought of method. … These works seem to have expanded from within and, grown from the energy of opposed directions, to hold their borders at bay, creating the spaces essential to their expressive existence (Goldwater Reference Goldwater1967, 6).
The art historian first posits that at the beginning of a Kline painting is a “pure emotion,” an “eruption” (“Ausbruch,” out-break): “One somehow has an eruption,” he says, and his first gesture embodies it. He pushes both hands, fingers spreading, rapidly forward from the chest, our culture’s home of the emotions (Figure 1, line 6). The “eruption” is quickly renamed “gestural eruption,” coupled with a larger eruption gesture (Figure 2, line 8).
Figure 1 Long description
A person is seated on a brown sofa in a living room, with legs crossed and wearing a red shirt. The individual is gesturing with both hands raised. The room features a white wall with several framed pictures, a tall plant and a wooden cabinet. A green watering can is visible on the floor near the sofa. The setting includes a mix of modern and traditional furniture, with a patterned carpet and a dark wooden shelf in the background.
Figure 2 Long description
One person sits on a sofa with legs crossed. Both arms are raised, with one hand holding a small rectangular object. The view shows the sofa in the foreground and a room behind it with wall pictures, a tall plant near a column, a doorway and a tall cabinet.
The gesture eruption is subsequently “driven further” (line 9, Figures 3–5) by motions of the hand which, if they left traces, would one by one make a semblance of a Kline painting appear, a crisscrossing of large, hand-wide strokes that we see as stripes being made by large strokes. By his gestures, the expert shows paintings as gestures, as he takes the position of the painter vis-à-vis the canvas. But his gesturing hands do not drag the paint, as they would were they holding a brush, but push, an image in line with the verbal descriptor, “driving further,” but not the painter’s moves. While this has no effect on the viewer’s ability to see a painting in the gestures, conceptually, it is the emotional eruption, not the brush, that is driven further.
Figure 3 Long description
One seated person is centered on a sofa, with both arms raised in front of the torso and elbows bent. The person wears a short-sleeve top and long pants. The sofa has two seat cushions and rounded armrests. A watering can sits on the floor near the sofa. The wall behind the sofa has several framed pictures and a hanging plant. An open doorway leads to a hallway with additional framed pictures and a tall cabinet.
Figure 4 Long description
A person is seated on a brown leather sofa in a living room, wearing a pink shirt and dark pants. They are raising their hands in front of them. The room has a white wall with several framed pictures and a tall plant in the corner. A wooden cabinet and a green watering can are visible in the background.
Figure 5 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa with legs crossed, raising one arm. The living room features a plant, framed pictures on the wall, a wooden cabinet and a green watering can on the floor. The room has a mix of modern and traditional decor elements.
The gesture is part of a multimodal interpretive description that merges reference to the act, to the picture, and to the psychological process bringing it forth. This seems apt, given the nature of the depicted phenomenon, an abstractly expressive painting.
Emphasizing the “directness” and “spontaneity” of Kline’s works, the art-historian then explains some of their inherent tensions. He gestures throughout, but his gestures neither depict the works nor their production, but are conceptual, concretizing notions such as “balance,” or serve meta-pragmatic functions. Only at one moment, when he says about the artist, “Ich bestaune ihn” (“I admire him,” transcript not shown), does he perform a single, short diagonal stroke while looking at his hand, and thereby invokes the painting as a visual object. The gesture shows that “admiring him” does not mean admiring the man, but his work. Now the gesture bears an indexical relation to prior gestures and the meanings that they have accrued in context. He also re-uses the hand shape of his Kline gestures when he discusses their overall composition and balance, but the motions conceive these qualities (e.g., balance), rather than depicting paintings.
The final gestured depiction of a Kline painting is the most elaborate one, and it is an expanded unit with a clear beginning and end. It is made from the same strokes, but the right hand is in a grip, as if holding a brush (Figs. 6–9). The gesture phrase is affiliated with the metaphorical description “das was da als schwarze Geste so frei steht,” “that which stands there so freely as a black gesture.”
Figure 6 Long description
Photograph showing a person seated on a dark sofa in a living room. The individual is wearing a red shirt and has crossed legs, suggesting a relaxed posture. The room features a wooden cabinet, a dining table with chairs and a shelf with items. Framed pictures are on the wall and a potted plant is near the dining area. A green watering can is on the floor, adding a casual touch to the setting.
Figure 7 Long description
A person is seated on a brown sofa in a living room, with one arm raised and the other hand open. The room features a bookshelf on the left, a plant in the corner and several framed pictures on the walls. A green watering can is on the floor near the sofa. The room has a doorway leading to another area.
Figure 8 Long description
One seated person is centered on a sofa, holding an open book or magazine across their lap. The person wears a short-sleeved top and long pants, with one leg crossed over the other. The room includes wall art, a hanging plant near an interior doorway and a cabinet with doors in the background. A watering can sits on the floor near the sofa. Additional seating and small furnishings are present deeper in the room.
Figure 9 Long description
The setting includes a wooden floor, a plant and several framed pictures on the wall. A green watering can is on the floor to the left. In the background, there is a doorway and a wooden cabinet. The composition suggests a casual and relaxed atmosphere.
But already at this point, CS has subverted the claim that the paintings make, to come from big, ballistic gestures: just before, he has shown Kline applying white-out and reworking the black strokes to intensify their gestural effect. The thumb squeezes the tube, the hand drags it along (Figs. 10, 11).
Figure 10 Long description
A photograph shows a person seated on a brown sofa in a living room, holding a small object in one hand. The setting includes a plant in the corner, framed pictures on the wall and a wooden cabinet near a door. The atmosphere appears casual and relaxed. A green watering can is on the floor beside the sofa, adding to the homey environment.
Figure 11 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa in a living room. The person is gesturing with one hand. The room features a bookshelf on the left, several framed pictures on the wall, a plant and a wooden cabinet in the background. A green watering can is visible on the floor near the sofa.
I have suggested that the gesture with which the art historian depicts, or conjures, these paintings—a broad stroke across the interlocutor’s visual field—is invented ad hoc, unrehearsed. But through repetition, it becomes a ready-made resource.
What the art historian articulates here can be called an ideology of gesture (Hoenes Del Pinal Reference Del Pinal2011). Gesture is construed as primal: a spontaneous eruption of emotions that burst out into the open in ballistic motions of arms and hands. Gesturing is construed as a primal process, unconstrained by inhibitions of convention and grammar. I will return to the ideology of the primal gesture below.
The element of chance: Pollock pouring paint
Many of Jackson Pollock’s “paintings” (they hang on walls) were made with the canvas stretched on the floor, by pouring paint on it or dripping it from a brush or stick. These works are known as pourings and drippings (the methods are usually combined in a single work).Footnote 3 The art-historian analyzes these works as a “dialogue between guided and unguided motion” and highlights the element of chance or risk in Pollock’s practice. On one hand are the emotion-guided motions of the artist, on the other a number of forces, including, in the case of pourings, the mass and consistency or fluidity of the paint, the pull of the heavy bucket, even the momentum that the painter’s arm itself develops. Apparently relying on his own tactile experiences with paint and paint buckets, the art historian’s hands seem at some points to inhabit paint, evoking a feeling—not just an image—of what it would be like to be paint swooping out of a bucket, and at others the artist’s hands holding and tilting the bucket or stirring paint.
As he produces the initial characterization of Pollock’s work as a “dialogue between guided and unguided movement,” CS first brings his thumbs together to count with them, projecting that there will be a second item, but then, when he refers to the second item, ‘“not-guided movement,” he makes the tip of one index finger tap the tip of the other, creating a tactile connection, corresponding to zwischen— “dialogue between” —in other words, indexing not the two items, but figuring their connection. (These gestures are not shown here.)
Depictive gesturing begins when the art historian shows how the paint behaves as Jackson Pollock is pouring it out of a bucket. The hands are the paint, their motions the paint’s flow or flight (Figs. 12-14). This flight is simultaneously described by the onomatopoetic noun Schwupps (which the dictionary badly translates as whoosh), more precisely by “Masse des Schwupps” “mass of the whoosh”).Footnote 4 As the paint has mass, so do arms and hands; when either is set in motion, it develops its own momentum. This is important, as CS himself will later point out, for the understanding of the artist’s practice, but also for how we may explain how hand movements can embody the flow of paint: what they have in common are the ballistic and sinuous trajectories of their movements—their kinetic and kinesthetic melodies (Luriia Reference Luriia1976; Sheets-Johnstone Reference Sheets-Johnstone, Koch, Summa and Müller2012). In that sense, the living body of the speaker may be able to empathize mimetically with paint thrown into flight.
Figure 12 Long description
A photograph showing a person in a pink shirt seated on a dark sofa in a living room, holding a phone with both hands. The setting includes a plant in the corner and several framed pictures on the wall. The room has a relaxed atmosphere, with a wooden cabinet near a door. The composition is a wide shot, centering the subject on the sofa.
Figure 13 Long description
A wide shot shows one person seated on a sofa with legs crossed, holding a small unidentified object in both hands near the chest. The person wears a short-sleeve shirt and trousers. Behind the sofa, a wall displays several framed pictures and a hanging plant. A doorway and a tall cabinet are in the background. A shelving unit with items is near the sofa. A watering can sits on the floor near the sofa.
Figure 14 Long description
A person wearing a red shirt is seated on a brown leather sofa in a living room. The person is holding a phone. The room features a white wall with several framed pictures, a tall plant and a wooden cabinet. A green watering can is visible on the floor near a dark wooden shelf.
The Schwupps-depicting gesture is repeated and expanded when “mass of the Schwupps” is redescribed as “how much paint comes over the edge of the paint bucket.” Here, too, a fleeting reference shift shows the ad hoc nature of gesture production. Having retracted his hands, CS first repeats the sinuous forward motion that embodies the flow of paint (Figure 14), but then stops as his hands-as-paint reach the edge of the bucket. He says “Kante” (edge) and then adds “dieses Farbeimer’s” (of this paint bucket). As he says this, his lax hands combine to a two-handed hold as they quickly seem to set an object down: the paint bucket is positioned before the viewer-listener. Into a depictive movement that refers to paint is inserted a gesture that introduces a new object into the discourse.
The art historian continues to discuss the factors that are in dialogue in Pollock’s work. At line 11, he embarks on a word-search, possibly for the word “Viskosität” (viscosity) or “Liquidität” (liquidity—both feminine and in agreement with “die”), but then abandons that search and settles for (masculine) Flüssigkeitsgrad, “liquidity level.” When, during the search, he repeats the article, “die” and rubs finger and thumb, a common gesture made when people search for a word or a proper formulation, but is also the mode of “active touch” (Gibson Reference Gibson1962) by which liquidity would be assessed. Such condensations of meaning are not uncommon in gestures (Figs 15, 16).
Figure 15 Long description
A person is seated on a brown sofa in a living room, wearing a red shirt and blue jeans. The individual is gesturing with both hands. The room features a variety of furniture and decor, including a green watering can on the floor, a patterned couch and several framed pictures on the wall. A wooden cabinet and chairs are visible in the background, along with a tall plant near the wall.
Figure 16 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa with legs crossed. The living room features a plant, several framed pictures on the wall and a wooden cabinet in the background. A green watering can is visible on the floor near the sofa.
Figure 17 Long description
A living room scene framed to include a sofa in the foreground and the room behind it. One person sits on the sofa with one leg crossed over the other and both hands raised near shoulder height. The person wears a short-sleeved top and trousers. Behind the sofa, a tall plant stands near a wall. Several framed pictures hang on the wall. A doorway and interior walls are visible in the background. A wooden cabinet stands to the right side of the room. A watering can sits on the floor at the left side of the scene.
Figure 18 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a dark couch in a living room. The person is gesturing with one hand. The room features a plant, several framed pictures on the wall, a wooden cabinet and a watering can on the floor. The space has a cozy and lived-in appearance with various furniture pieces and decor items.
Figure 19 Long description
A photograph showing a person seated on a dark sofa with arms spread wide, wearing a pink shirt and crossed legs. The setting is a living room with visible elements like a bookshelf and wall art. The perspective is a medium shot from the front, conveying a relaxed atmosphere. The background includes a doorway and a cabinet, providing context to the home environment.
Figure 20 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa in a living room. The person has their legs crossed and is holding a red pillow. The room features a tall plant in the background, several framed pictures on the wall and a wooden cabinet near a door. A green watering can is visible on the floor to the left.
CS continues to identify the factors that determine the paint’s behavior: its “Trägheitsmoment” (moment of inertia) and “Expansionsfähigkeit” (expandability) beim “Aufklatsch” (“at on-splash”). With “expandability,” the art historian’s hands once again embody the paint as it specifically behaves as a result of Pollock’s actions. The gesture he makes as he searches for the term launches a theme that is then elaborated in several increments, but this elaboration does not add features but is rather an increasingly self-aware analysis of the same, repeated motion. Looking at this gesture phrase closely, we can see how the art-historian’s thoughts unfold along with his movements. The relationship between thought and gesture is usually explained without regard for the fact that it is the hands that are making gestures and the contributions they make, or for the role of kinesthesia in the gesturing speaker’s lived experience (Efron Reference Efron1972 (1941); McNeill Reference McNeill1992). But, evidently, CS responds to his kinesthetic sensations as he feels his gestures, and these sensations impact what he says. We can see, to paraphrase Kleist (Reference Kleist1807-Reference Kleist8), “how he fabricates thoughts while gesturing.”
The art-historian has introduced the paint’s moment of inertia (“Trägheitsmoment”) as one of the uncontrolled forces conspiring in the paint’s splatter. This is a physicist’s term that lay people rarely use. The art-historian quickly seeks to replace it, first coming upon, but apparently, by-passing, either “gravity” (“Schwerkraft”) or “momentum” (Schwungkraft; see initial “Sch”/sh, line 13). He then settles on “Expansionsfähigkeit,” “expand-ability,” and adds “beim Aufklatsch,” “at on-splash.” His hands find fitting imagery faster than his voice. Already when he utters “Sch- äh,” his arms rapidly spread apart as far as they can, figuring the expansion of the paint—the growth of the splatter—on the ground. When he then utters “Expansionsfähigkeit,” he repeats the gesture. As he utters “auf der” (on the, line 14), he makes a small tapping motion with both hands, a deictic gesture, indexing the ground. Then he makes the on-splash gesture a third time, the hands this time falling from a higher level, sharpening the figure. (The images show the third installment.)
What follows is yet another gesture showing the motions of paint, but not this time at the moment of splash, but flowing out of the bucket. The gesture (not shown) is a sinuous up-down motion of the right arm, embodying the trajectory of the paint’s flow. The phenomenon is described as “the mass that runs over the edge.”
To this uncontrollable force is added the movement of the artist, first depicted by a horizontal circular motion pivoting at the elbow, then repeated twice from the wrist and thus more closely matching the artist’s hand stirring paint, but now in synchrony with “des Eimers,” of the bucket. Gesture and speech briefly part ways, and for once, gesture lags behind. McNeill calls this “gestural inertia” (McNeill Reference McNeill and McNeill2000).
We can put together a mosaic: we see the artist somehow bringing the paint in a bucket into rotation so that it begins to spin, at which moment it will be poured onto the canvas, its mass and momentum of inertia shaping the marks that it makes.
Kinesthesia’s contribution to this unfolding semiosis (or meta-semiosis) reveals itself most clearly in another series of gestures, also built from the expansion gesture, the last part of the discourse to be investigated here. First, CS sums up his previous points as illustrations of the element of chance in Pollock’s practice, the contributions by forces “that have nothing to do in the narrower [sense] with the artist.” Then he re-introduces the movements of the artist as the other voice in the dialogue, in order to quickly return to a force the artist cannot fully control: the momentum of his own arm, which, after all, is attached to a heavy bucket. The artist’s “emotion-driven” movements are first evoked by a small, one-armed version of the expansion gesture (Figure 21, line 40, during “emotional gesteuerten”), which is now more sinuous, the left arm swinging down and to the side, rather than sideways. He repeats the gesture and adds the motion’s own dynamic as a force (line 41, “aus der Dynamik der Bewegung heraus”); and produces a third, much larger, version along with “sich verselbständigenden” (“self-emancipating,” Figures 22, 23, line 42), and retracts the hand on “Bewegung” (movement), finally arriving at the end of the 14-word noun phrase.
Figure 21 Long description
A medium-wide shot of a man seated on a dark leather sofa in an indoor living room setting. The man wears a pink shirt and dark trousers. He holds a small, unidentified object in one hand, raised toward his chest. His posture is upright and his legs are crossed. To the left of the sofa, a green watering can rests on the floor. A potted plant with tall stems stands in the background near a wall. Several framed items hang on the white walls behind him. A wooden cabinet is visible in the far right background. The room has a high ceiling and appears to have large windows, with natural light present in the scene.
Figure 22 Long description
The person is positioned centrally on the sofa, with arms crossed in a relaxed posture. The room features a dark wooden shelf on the left, a patterned cushion on the sofa and several framed pictures on the wall behind. A tall plant is near the wall and a wooden cabinet is visible in the background. The setting appears casual and cozy, with a light-colored ceiling featuring decorative molding. The composition is a wide shot, capturing the entire room and its furnishings.
Figure 23 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a dark sofa in a living room. The individual is crossing their legs and gesturing with one hand raised. The room features a bookshelf on the left, a series of framed pictures on the wall, a plant in the corner and a wooden cabinet in the background. A green watering can is placed on the floor near the sofa.
But then he appends “auch eines Armes” (also of an arm), separating the arm from the artist: whatever the artist’s driving emotion, the mass and momentum of an arm constitute its own force. For this increment, he switches arms. He brings his right hand to his face and then swings it down and all the way to the side, following the hand with his eyes (Figures 24, 25).
Figure 24 Long description
A person wearing a red shirt is seated on a brown sofa in a living room. The person has their legs crossed and is gesturing with one hand. The room features a tall plant in the background, a series of framed pictures on the wall and a wooden cabinet near a door. A green watering can is visible on the floor to the left.
Figure 25 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa in a living room. The person is holding a remote control in one hand, with legs crossed. The room features a plant, a bookshelf and several framed pictures on the wall. A wooden cabinet and a door are visible in the background.
By switching arms between installments of the swinging gesture, which began as an illustration of emotion-driven motion, the current idea, the autonomy or independence of the movement of the arm as a physical object, is conveyed by one bounded gestural image. Schneegass repeats the gesture two more times, as he explains that the arm gives in to the momentum of the bucket. This is embodied by a small, quick head and torso tilt to the imaginary bucket’s side (at line 45).
Alternatively, the artist can respond to the centrifugal momentum of arm and bucket by pulling it back with force and beginning to steer, as CS demonstrates with his last gestures (Figure 26., lines 48–49).
Figure 26 Long description
A person wearing a pink shirt is seated on a brown sofa in a living room. The room features a tall plant in the background, several framed pictures on the wall and a wooden cabinet near a door. A green watering can is visible on the floor to the left.
As he makes these gestures, the art-historian becomes aware of their kinesthetic melodies. When he makes the first gesture with his left arm, he notices the arm’s momentum, and then he exhibits it in another, more expansive and granular gesture. As he makes that gesture, apparently due to his own bodily memory or his imagining the artist at work, he realizes that the arm would be attached to a bucket and moves as if his did, too, and then unpacks what this gesture has shown (the pull of the bucket), and goes on to describe and embody an action that Pollock could take in response.
We can call the art-historian’s understanding of the art tactile and kinesthetic: he feels and grasps the birthing of works by gestures that apprehend the feel of actions and materials, experiencing the flow of paint in the flow of his motions. His interpretation unfolds along with his kinesthetic awareness.
Ideologies of gesture
Since the earliest extant accounts of gesture in European history, notably by the Roman rhetorician Quintilianus, but also in Hinduism and many other cultural contexts, some types of gestures, or their motion range and tempo, or the practice of gesturing as such, have been subjected to cultural valorization and regimentation. Quintilianus ([100] 1978) forbade public speakers any kind of iconicity, not to mention pantomime, because these modes—showing the world rather than evoking it by words—belonged to the actor, not the rhetor, on the stage, not the rostrum. The gestures he ordered were metapragmatic: marking emphasis, mapping out the arc of a sentence, embodying illocutions, and so on. Burke (Reference Burke, Bremmer and Roodenburg1992) has reconstructed the restraining of gesturing among the Catholic clergy during the Counter-Reformation, “which formed part of [its] moral discipline” (Burke Reference Burke, Bremmer and Roodenburg1992, 76). The goal was “gravity.” To achieve a habitus of gravitas, it was necessary “to be conscious of one’s gestures in order to control them. The hands and legs in particular need[ed] discipline” (loc. cit.). But, Burke notes,
the reform of gesture, if not more rigorous, was at least more successful in the northern Protestant parts of Europe … than in the Catholic south; … the stereotype of the gesticulating Italian, still current in the north, came into existence in the early modern period; and …reflects a contrast between two gestural cultures, associated with two styles of rhetoric (more or less copious) and other differences as well (Burke Reference Burke, Bremmer and Roodenburg1992, 79).
Hoenes del Pinal, in Towards an ideology of gesture (Reference Del Pinal2011) contrasts the comparative bodily comportment and discourse on performance styles among two Catholic denominations in a Q’eqchi-Maya village in Guatemala, one mainstream, one charismatic. Members of both congregations are prone to show their mutual disapproval by producing and debating hyperbolic versions of one another’s gestures:
Mainstream Catholics might place their hands high above their heads to mimic the characteristic ‘hands up/palms out’ posture of Charismatic prayer when criticizing the latter’s loud prayer meetings. Mainstream Catholics … claim that Charismatics are loud and “out of control” when they should properly be quiet and respectful. Similarly, Charismatics criticizing Mainstream Catholics’ practices will fold their arms and hunch their shoulders as a means of both mimicking the latter’s characteristic prayer postures and advancing the idea that this sort of prayer lacks enthusiasm and is thus undertaken in bad faith (Hoenes Del Pinal Reference Del Pinal2011, 597).
All these three discourses are built on the binary opposition between a primal, “wild” impulse to gesture and moderation, achieved by self-control. The Abstract Expressionists operated with the same dichotomy, but situated themselves on the side of spontaneity and wildness. Pollock, according to Cernuschi (Reference Cernuschi1992), understood his art as coming from his unconscious, primary processes. But he was influenced by C.G. Jung and his belief in a collective unconscious, and thus himself came to believe that, by letting movements flow from his own unconscious, he gave uninhibited expression to the primal, collective unconscious of the human species.Footnote 5
Reviewing the books that Pollock read, Cernuschi shows the influence of 19th century anthropologists’ colonialist construction of the “primitive mind” (for example Lévy-Bruhl’s Primitive Mentality; Lévy-Bruhl 1923), and the idea that humanity, in its cultural evolution, replicates the development of a child: “Mankind as a whole had to pass through the phases of intellectual and physical development which today characterize the development of each individual in the human mass” (Boule Reference Boule1923, 212).
“Gestural painting… [exhibits] a fascination with the primal sign, with traces of the artist’s hand as images, and their relation to the beginnings of communication” (Cernuschi Reference Cernuschi1992, 216).
The quick, spontaneous movement of the hand, and the often improvisational quality of the marks, reveal an attempt to translate a physical gesture on canvas directly, without mediation … The creation of primal signs ostensibly reconstructs the original style of creativity, when humanity was attempting to express messages with marks not yet systematically codified in a written alphabet. In this way the marks retain an autonomous quality as expressive signature, rather than as a specific character functioning within a predetermined system of communication (Cernuschi Reference Cernuschi1992, 216).
Barnett Newman, speaking on behalf of the New York School about tribal art, argued that
there is an answer in these works to all those who assume that modern abstract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish elite, for among these simple people abstract art was the dominant, well-understood tradition (Newman, cited in Cernuschi Reference Cernuschi1992, 215.)
But their own practice belied their ideology. This is most evident in the works of Franz Kline.
Each of Kline’s paintings seems the spontaneous, unretouched record of an impulsive mood noted in broad, confident strokes, quick in their application, sure in their placement and relation. Yet Kline rarely worked in this fashion and only a few pictures were executed at one sitting. Most of the canvases are actually the final result of long study, of adjustment and readjustment, with edges shifted back and forth and areas painted and repainted until the artist was satisfied that he had achieved the right relation of form, the … interplay of … energy and restraint, flat surface and deep space. Many of the broad directional strokes, whose force seems the product of a single inspirational gesture were actually painted with small brushes; and many an entire outsize work had its model in one of Kline’s innumerable small sketches, only later quite deliberately enlarged …We must … not be deceived into easy correlations between mood and method, substance and process. In their ultimate aspect, as we examine them today, these pictures largely conceal the stages of their construction. They are apparently unrehearsed, and we seem to see them grow. But this is in fact illusion and we cannot in fact relive their progression. By the same token, the final work is far from being the direct, unfiltered record of a state of mind impetuously … externalized in gesture upon the canvas. Without clarity of image and cohesion of structure spontaneity would not strike us with the force it does, and these qualities are attained only by analysis and reflection. (Goldwater Reference Goldwater1967, 7)
The art of improvising gestures
Hillewaert, in her contribution to this issue, describes the “gap” that can open up at any time between the rehearsed, memorized grips of a rock-climber on a climb and the conditions that the climber’s hands and feet encounter on any this occasion. Gaps can also open up at any time in a speaker’s utterance when a word does not want to rise from lexical memory. Gesturing the intended meaning is a common practice to bridge the gap (Goodwin and Goodwin Reference Goodwin and Goodwin1986). Word-searches magnify the circumstances under which speaker-gesturers find themselves whenever they need another word, phrase, or gesture. But there is more than an analogy between climber and gesturer: both are groping for the right grip. The root-meaning of the Latinate word “concept” is grip; the German equivalent is “Be-griff,” cognate with “grip.” (A colloquial German word for brain is “Grips.”) These etymologies point to the insight that grasping is a primal human way of knowing the world. The gesturing hands of speakers often speak the language of grips, informed by tactile and haptic world-knowledge. Hands articulate whatever needs conceptualization by schemata derived from their interactions with the world at hand (Streeck Reference Streeck2009, Reference Streeck2021). This is how they help speakers to “bridge the gap.” There are many sources that can inform the formation of a gesture.
Many of the art-historian’s gestures are formed by mimesis: he enacts versions of the actions with which the artists apply paint. These gestures are informed by his intimate, “muscular” knowledge of how such art is being made. He himself has experimented with écriture automatique and other modes of art-making that are “dialogues between controlled and uncontrolled movement.” But he also makes depictive gestures that are drawn from a more widely shared stock. When he points out that, what first appears as free-standing black gestures has been worked over with white-out, his hand enacts squeezing a tube. This is the schema of an ordinary action that everyone who has handled tubes would make, and thus a gesture any member of the material culture understands. Common everyday actions are also seen when he rubs thumb and index finger as he searches for the term “liquidity level,” enacting an abstracted version of an exploratory action by which this feature would be tested, but also thereby, perhaps not incidentally, making a gesture that is frequently made by speakers searching for a precise formulation “condensation” of meanings (Freud Reference Freud1955). Whenever we watch people who gesture copiously during storytelling or other genres of talk about the world, we see such rapid shifts between symbolic resources (Goodwin Reference Goodwin2018) and methods (Streeck Reference Streeck2008, Reference Streeck2017).
Musicologist Joseph Schloss (Reference Schloss2009) illuminates the importance of improvisation in break dancing (b-boying). The break dancer must know what can be done on different surfaces “look into [their] … repertoire to choose … what … would work with the surface.” (Schloss Reference Schloss2009, 95):
The more options you have in any given situation, the more freedom you have to choose the most appropriate one. … You are not tied to any particular strategy and have the luxury of changing your approach as the situation changes. B-boying … teaches its practitioners exactly how to negotiate change. (Schloss Reference Schloss2009, 96).
This is also true of everyday gesturing, an art that is rarely trained or taught, but acquired by osmosis and practiced and elaborated by individual society members to different degrees, allowing for individual styling, which the culture may attribute to personality traits. But gesture offers much greater freedom for improvisation than b-boying or other regimented, competitive improvisation genres, and this freedom is copiously exercised by many speakers when they tell stories or explain the world. A hallmark of the improvisation of gestures in everyday conversation are the frequent and unpredictable shifts between semiotic modes and resources that they are drawn from, and the astonishing ability of listener–viewers to track, and at the same disregard, them—all of which is possible only against the backdrop of shared knowledge that is partly accumulated in the conversation, partly assumed: only someone who has seen a Kline painting can see it in the gestures; only someone who has handled buckets—or seen someone handle them—can see one in the art-historian’s hands (Gombrich Reference Gombrich and Series1961).
A feature that gesture shares with b-boying and other forms of improvisational semiosis, such as Greek oral poetry, rap, and jazz, and that can be observed in this conversation, is the fabrication and stabilization of new resources through parallelism and repetition. Hillewaert conceives of the incorporation of grips through repetition as a lexicalization process. The art-historian first introduces Kline’s paintings via the “eruption” of two expansive, diagonal strokes, and subsequently produces abbreviated, elaborated, and combined versions. Successive gestures layer brushstrokes over brushstrokes, and a Kline painting, presenting itself as arrested motion, emerges in them. Variations of the gesture bring different ways of apprehending the works to the fore, their composition, or immediate effect, or inner tension.
Sense-making by gesture involves varieties of transformation, synthesis (or blending, condensation), and reconfiguration of sensations. Always and inevitably, gestures produce enactive (kinesthetic) sensations—feelings of action—in the maker. At the same time, they are objects of visual perception for the addressee. Gestures can make tactile experiences visible. Transmodality (Murphy Reference Murphy2012), transposing sensory experience from one modality to another, is one of the ways in which hands make sense by gesturing.
McCullough writes:
Whereas the eyes stay fixed on the outer surface of things, hands have a way of getting inside, and so they contribute more to our belief in the reality of the world. … Hands also discover. They have a life of their own that leads them into explorations. For example, a sculptor’s feel for a material will suggest actions to try, and places to cut. Learning through the hands shapes creativity itself (McCullough Reference McCullough1996, 8).
German playwright Heinrich von Kleist (Reference Kleist1807-Reference Kleist8) observed in his essay On the gradual fabrication of thoughts through speech that we often do not know what we are going to say and that our thoughts accrue to us from our spontaneous speech to others and from their responses. “A glance which announces a half-expressed thought as already understood often gives us the expression for the entire other half” (Kleist Reference Kleist1807-Reference Kleist8, 2). No matter how the addressee responds, we have seen that gesturing is also a dialogue within the speaker, who usually does not consciously control it, but often notices making a gesture after the fact (or while making it). And human hands draw upon the whole range of memories, skills, practiced methods, the public gesture stock, and more as they are making sense of something by making gestures. This is their improvising take on the world.
Acknowledgements
I thank Randeep Singh Hothi and the other contributors for our lively conversations, and an anonymous reviewer for insights into what I wanted to say that I did not have myself. My art teacher, Herr Eckhart, a painter, nourished my young curiosity about modern art by giving me all As on my de Kooning-wannabes in 7th grade, and I dedicate this to him.
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