In which the author approaches Jackson Pollock with humility instead of ire, which seemed to do something. In which Pollock's "No. 6, 1952" becomes a little more than drips and numbers. In which several other ways of looking at an abstract work of art are offered. And where furniture, for some ungodly reason, comes back a-haunting.
MY FIRST JACKSON POLLOCK
I remember the first time I really had a go at Jackson Pollock. Here was an icon of 20th century art who had time and again elicited nothing but disdain from me. Can you blame me? The guy dropped paint on a canvas and offered it as a painting, which given the existence of both canvas and paint, it probably was. My preferences lie (or at one time, lay) along a range from Classical Greece to Marcel Duchamp. Clear cut. A smooth beginning and a thunderclap end in wire and porcelain, mirrors and boxes, and naked people that weren’t really naked. Beyond Duchamp I was a bit of an art luddite. Pollock’s methods didn’t seem to be based in chance, as much as they were based in (quite literally) action and its unforeseeable consequences (like a predictable drunk, but in an abstract way). His paintings were performance art that you could take home with you but without the need to feed a hungry, needy artist. His paintings were outside any language system that I could reference quickly and with intelligence. His paintings were more about his name than about his art. He had made them, they were artifacts left over from a moment of doing that I could not relate to. Most of all, they were spotlights on my own inexperience.
So when I finally decided (one year ago exactly) to swallow my youthful pride and really spend some time with Jackson Pollock, I was surprised. I take this as a good thing.
Let’s look at the painfully obvious. His drip paintings were not chairs I could sit in. His splotches of paint were not tables at which I could work. His titles weren’t sofas on which I could stretch my tired body after a long day’s work. They were anti-utility. They didn’t depict, formalize, explain, stimulate, soothe, or batter. They were what they were, after all that hard work, toil, marketing, and explanation from pedants, lovers, and curators.
Now there’s a revelation. That art could be the Non-Everything until in a moment it latches leech-like onto something, suction cupped to reality, made stronger by spit. Painting is anti-utility. Hmm.
But that word “anti-utility” is instantly embarrassing to me, since it implies that all along I had been viewing art through a prism that refracts the art object into a spectrum of usefulness that relates to my eyes alone.
The painting that gave me more of a hold on Jackson Pollock hangs in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. It looks like this.
 |
| "No. 6, 1952" by Jackson Pollock, 1952. Hanging in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art |
And it is titled like this:
“NO. 6, 1952”
My options for looking at the Pollock seem to be pretty wide open now that anti-utility has crossed my lips.
OTHER WAYS TO LOOK AT JACKSON POLLOCK’S "NO. 6, 1952"
- AS A PAINTING. I really didn’t want to do this. I fought against it. For a boy in love with Leonardo da Vinci, Aubrey Beardsley, Michelangelo, and Edouard Manet, this was tantamount to sacrilege. Like putting peanut butter and jelly on cold wet noodles.
- AS AN EXPRESSION. As someone who didn't care who Pollock was, I could barely care about anything he was trying to express. Naughty. Something I should probably correct.
- AS AN EVENT. A little closer to my heart. I want the moment of my art to be something I can return to. This is a big burden to lay on a little painting. Like asking a four-year-old to explain divorce.
- AS AN ACCIDENT. Closer still to my heart, since neither fate nor faith can come into it anymore.
- AS AN ARTIFACT. That could work. An archeologist is always at least a little satisfied by the smallest shard and pock of pottery.
- AS A MEMORY. Why the hell would I want to remember this? Did he actually do anything? Is this any different than bleeding all over the floor or getting a hair cut? This implies the meaning resides in the paint itself. Gosh golly and gee whiz, I should have been a semiotician.
- AS A MEANS TO AN END. Yes, artists do things as a means to end. Not very revealing, Mr. Hischier.
- AS A CURIO. Without a doubt, this piece is at least a curiosity. Into the cabinet with you!
- AS A FOOTNOTE. To what paragraph?
- AS AN INSTIGATION. Against what? The idiocy of controlled abstraction? That was interesting.
- AS A MANIFESTATION. Of the futility of skill? Of the ironic non-futility of creating futile art that fetches thousands of dollars from collectors of futility-nulling knick knacks?
- AS NOTHING. Utter zero. Perhaps Pythagoras would like it.
- AS SOMETHING. The sum of god knows what numbers. Maybe Einstein could tell me all about it.
But I found that while all of these things flitted through my brain, nothing was consistent except my frustration. This painting was a swarm of gnats ruining my nice picnic, filling my chicken lungs and activating that adorable suffocation response we all love so much. I know his place in art history, but that doesn’t matter to me. I know a little bit of his personal story, but that matters to me even less (having been trained by a post-mortem, book-entombed Nabokov to only consider the art). I know that he eventually died, but that didn't help anybody but his enemies.
The only thing I found consistent in all of the above ways to look at Jackson Pollock was stimulation. Jackson Pollock’s “No. 6, 1952” was stimulating my brain.
THE STIMULATING JACKSON POLLOCK
Stimulation is everything. It is necessary for survival. It is necessary to recognize threat. It is necessary to avoid stultifying indifference. It saves the depressed or becomes the god who is too fantastic to exist for the hyper-depressed. Stimulus provokes response and as stimulus, Pollocks’ “No. 6, 1952” was brilliantly conceived, no matter what critics, pundits, exhibitors, patrons, or chumps like me are trying to say.
Unfortunately, this brings me back to the furniture of PROBLEM 0009. Furniture is, by definition, a support that lacks in stimulus. The recent creation by Annie Evelyn of furniture that looks-uncomfortable-but-isn’t reminds me that furniture isn’t supposed to stimulate anything.
Art is the opposite of non-stimulation, but I’m not entirely convinced that the opposite of non-stimulation is stimulation. Because if I remain unstimulated by the art under observation, that doesn’t disqualify it from the realm of art: that disqualifies me from engaging with it at the moment. If someday in the future I find it stimulating, fine. If that day never comes, fine. The art doesn’t suffer and I will have found other things to stimulate me. Jackson Pollock’s work finally did something to me. Took fifteen years.
The fact that a work of art did not stimulate the one looking upon it does not mean that the work of art has failed. It simply means that something did not happen. This cannot be a value judgement. Where this leaves the art critic is a problem for another day.
{ 0 comments... read them below or add one }
Post a Comment