In this watercolour, as in For Abs. Exp. 1, we are shown a map patched together into an anthropomorphic form, a Frankenstein of erudite and vernacular allusions – political, literary, popular and artistic – both fictional and real. These allusions are accompanied by comments on the work itself, linking the practice of painting (and especially those of process painting and the French group Supports/Surfaces) to that of haberdashery and sewing. The palette here is darker than in Abs. Exp. 1, and the metaphor becomes more venomous, also using phallic images. The framing border of this false strategic map (or map locating a ‘treasure trove’) is carefully cut, following the edge of the drawing. Here again, we find a pastiche of brush marks, referring both to gestural painting and to the accidents that occur in painting – blots, splats, drips – but also a satiric critique of the very fact that these accidents (and other products of mishap or chance) were considered to be works of art by some early modernists as well as the vanguards of the 1970s. The montage of quotations in this work, as in other watercolours of the same period, also brings together various other concerns, resulting in an unsettling vexation of the history of art, and of the work of the artist himself.

MPS

May 2010