As if that were taboo … to dream … to feel. Bah. “The ineffable! We don’t discuss it,” the wary Clem Greenberg dismissed the spirituality in Pollock’s art, glaring at me, defensive, when I asked him this simple question that my own Ph.D. thesis in “Shamanism and Art” hinged on. Greenberg’s ordered comfort zone was scripted formalist reductionism, where a painting was “six inches off the picture plane, step in, all over look”—which pretty much describes wallpaper. Smart Art did not dabble in the pensées sauvages of the occult. Hey, Clem knew he’d be hit hard by the neo-rationalist spoilsports were he to broach the ineffable. So he pretty much killed Modernism as a subject of inquiry.
The nasty, tiny book Mysticism and Logic, by mathematician Bertrand Russell, swipes at the irrationality of Henri Bergson and the mystics: “How dare they?” A great moment occurs when Berty finds falling
Article source: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/06/criticspage/this-is-not-the-article-just-coffee-talk