PROBLEM 0011: Jackson Pollock At The Garage Sale

In which the author finds a Jackson Pollock at a garage sale. Wherein are found the author’s impressions of the dusty, inexpensive Pollock. Where a narrative is accidentally dripped all over an abstract work. And where real, honest-to-goodness information doesn’t do us any good at all.

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[Note: the painting under examination hangs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO: if you're ever in KC, stop by. It's a great museum.]
It seems like now is a good time to attempt the objective examination of a work of art out of all context. The Problem? Looking at an artwork while ostensibly knowing nothing. I should find this very, very easy to do.

I know, I know. “Out of all context” is more impossible than most impossible things. Even these sentences are context and as you can see I am doomed from the start. But still, watching a doomed man can be a whole lot of fun. It’ll be like watching a Bergman film, only with a slightly bigger sense of humor (for those of you wondering, Bergman films are like early Woody Allen films without the funny stuff)(those of you wondering when Woody Allen was funny, it was quite a while ago)(Midnight in Paris was such a fluke; still love the guy, though).

This exercise will intentionally go against the painting’s title (see below if you must spoil the fun), the painting’s meaning (nowhere mentioned here), the painting’s place in art history (which is either getting smaller or larger by the second), the artist’s name (way down below, but if you read the title of this post you know it already), and the beloved museum where I first encountered it (five blocks away). 

So here’s the new context. I’ve just found it in a garage sale, no lie. 

It is a sunny Saturday morning. I’ve been to five garage sales already. Between us, my wife and I have purchased $37.50 worth of crap. I’ve picked up three books, one bowling ball, and half a lamp. She’s bought mostly old toys. Here, at the sixth garage sale, I was interested in a complete set of volumes written by the Illuminati themselves, complete with warning bookplates covered in eyes and triangles, demanding that the books be burned if the present owner ever dies. The owner is dead (a photo of him in a fishing boat with a dangling trout hangs dusty on the garage wall, not for sale). I am considering purchasing the entire box of books, but I see something else out of the corner of my eye. It looks like art. It smells like art. I won’t lick it, but I bet it even tastes like art. It has been cared for like art. It is leaning against a table saw, barely threatened by the teeth poised above it, lending support to several very dingy cobwebs.

I don’t know what it is, who has painted it, or what it’s all about. So I push a box of hobby-room doilies and plaster bunny rabbits away from it and step back. I want a good look at it.

0. FIRST GLANCE

Hmm. No thoughts yet. Looks kind of cool. Can’t quite tell what it is. I get closer to examine some details.

I. FIRST DETAIL

Look at that. Delicious. A very calligraphic hand. Simple black paint on a plain canvas. Interesting line control. The entire arm is moving the paintbrush around. Rhythms in the swell and slip of stroke. Very energetic movement in the application, reminiscent of the cartoonist’s symbol for speed, the swooshing lines.

II. SECOND DETAIL

I scoot over to the left, hunched down. Here we have a dog’s head, just above my eye level. I’m conscious of other garage sale pickers watching me, wondering if I’ve found something valuable. I decide not to tell my wife that I’ve spotted a dog hiding like Waldo in the upper left. Wouldn’t want other people to start reading into this thing. It might move them to offer more money than I’m willing to spend.

It’s clearly a regal dog. A german shepherd, with a dark snout and piercing eyes, its ears at the ready, listening for noises that never come. The technique is somewhere between a primitive cave painting and a gestural sketch. The dog has been guarding something for a very long time. You can see it’s getting a little sleepy. Poor dog. The artist seems to have lost patience in drawing the far ear, though, as it is merely a sloppy line that extends through the boundary of the snout from the base of the skull. For all its simplicity, the fur of the dog is effectively rendered. Nice job, artist. Should have worked harder on that ear, though.

III. THIRD DETAIL

Baffling. The artist is still rendering textures consistently across the painting. But this thing. Wouldn’t have expected to see a glyph in the midst of all this. Glyphs take us immediately into the realm of language or semiotics, and I want to stay away from there. Still, it is difficult not to see in the double curved symbol at the center of this detail a figure 8 or 6 or the Artist’s initials or the infinity symbol. Yet it feels deliberate and could signify the eternal nature of the meaning of the painting. Then again, it might simply be the hour at which the artist is to have his next dental appointment.

IV. FOURTH DETAIL

Pulling back farther, the dog is more clearly seen. Its regal chest is puffed out, prideful in its duty. The mountains or pointy hills (one can never tell with this artist, who doesn’t seem inclined to render reality with care) just over his back imply an inland location, perhaps Switzerland or Appalachia. They’re quite volcanic. Pacific, maybe? The artist is clearly getting more agitated with the piece as he or she goes along, choosing to build forms with violent brush strokes. One doesn’t imagine that much of this painting was made slowly. 

Only just noticed the flecks of white paint spattered here and there. What was he thinking?

V. FIFTH DETAIL

This detail is pulled even farther back, but with the dog purposely beheaded. It is this central region of the painting that is most interesting, for without the full view of the dog, we are left with a composition made up entirely of competing light and dark areas, a chaos embraced rather than overcome. The gas within the vessel has been heated up until it threatens to burst the bounds of the painting. It’s hard not to get poetic when faced with such a protean mass as this. Comparing this detail with the previous, I begin to detect a face (at top center here, at top right in the previous detail). Could there be a human being in this mess? Oh god no, not a human. 

VI. FIRST DIAGRAM

Nuts. It is a human. Returning to the full view, I trace the lines of the dog and what I now believe is a female human falling dumbstruck behind it. If the dog is guarding her, it is guarding only her body—her mind is clearly lost to whatever society gave birth to her. It is also possible that this woman was raised by this dog, and in adulthood is finally approaching death, having become too overweight to run with the rest of the pack, a liability to the family which raised her from infanthood.

I am surprised at how quickly I have devolved into narrative with the inclusion of this woman in the painting. Narrative is a bum and doesn’t seem to have a place in a somewhat abstract work of art. I suspect this artist is going to be very unhappy with me. I hope he isn’t at this garage sale. I look at the woman sitting behind the table, a box full of small bills and change sitting bored next to her empty lemonade glass. She’s at least seventy years old, sweating in the heat, and watching me. I’m going to be very embarrassed if she painted this thing.

VII. SECOND DIAGRAM

I put my hands around my eyes, making little binoculars out of them. I want to see this dog better. My feet are going numb from the five minute long crouch. I shift my weight and my right knee cracks a sharply. That’s better.

Isolating the forms of the dog in this fashion for a better view, I see to my surprise that this is not a dog after all, but a kangaroo. The fact that the woman no longer fits inside its pouch is cause for sadness. The marsupial mother must now carry the woman upon her back, her maternal utility subverted by the incomprehensible expansion of the woman who once hopped freely by her side. 

VIII. FULL PAINTING

I decide to buy it. The old lady wants thirty bucks for it. I tell her I have twenty. She asks for twenty-five. I hesitate a little. Okay. Twenty-five. But I want that box of books too. Thirty-five total. My wife shakes her head. “Why do you want that crap?” “I don’t know. I just like it.”

SUDDEN CONTEXT RAINS ON ME 

Well, that was fun. 

Bit now, with nothing obscuring our vision, we can now look at this work and allow the details settle upon us. It is by the artist Jackson Pollock. It is titled “No. 6, 1952” and is oil and enamel on canvas. Its dimensions are 4’10.5” x 3’11”. It is located in gallery L2 of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO.

Does this additional information tell us anything? 

Without any additional information, we can assume that minimally five paintings preceded it prior to some date in 1952, unless the painter was as loose with whole numbers as he was with representation. We can also assume that if size has any meaning at all, he felt that this picture should be writ large, so to speak. And what was “writ large”? It’s hard to tell. I doubt it’s a dog/kangaroo and a woman. Then again, we humans could find meaningful patterns in a bowl of baked beans. Pareidolia is a wonderful thing.

Popular context adds several more details: Jackson Pollock was occasionally inebriated, depressed enough to have certain, um, difficulties, and was an innovative action painter fond of dripping his paint in a rather non-sensical fashion that yet breeds sense of some kind. 

What does all this really tell us? It tells us who painted it. That’s really about it. I don’t know how those details could be any more helpful than my blasphemy up top.

All I know is that nearly all treatments of art are absurd—Samuel Beckett absurd. 

I also know that, like all human endeavors, art really deserves this treatment. 

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