I'll be the first to admit I don't understand modern art, I'm more interested in Impressionism. Having said that, what exactly is it about Jackson Pollock that is supposed to be impressive. Seriously, can you even be a painter if you don't even paint your work? If I threw paint at the floor, would that be considered art? Actually, the film about his life is far more interesting than any painting I've ever seen of his.
shareA further reason for Pollock's appeal was the reason he became popular in the first place. I'm studying him for my dissertation, and a lot of his reputation was formed by critics - notably Greenberg - who manipulated his art for their own ends. Pollock was trying to express his own psyche in his paintings, but critics wanted to read his work as meaningless and free. Work with meaning at the time was linked to Russian/ German propaganda painting - Pollock was so different, so much freer than that. He could paint however he liked and it didn't have to say a thing. Why do you think that nowadays lots of art doesn't seem to have a meaning? The focus placed on art school students in the 50's and 60's was that art should be about sensation and artistic freedom, of which Pollock's work was the greatest example.
His appeal was therefore twofold - he made great art, but it was publicised at great art for the American People above any other form.
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that is how i feel about art, my perception of the overly used words "good art", it provokes the viewer on an emotional level. that's what i find appealing to pollock's paintings. but if you are saying just because his (and/or other abstract painters) paintings are abstract, that's what makes his paintings emotionally provoking, than i will have to disagree because i find even literal paintings of portraits can be emotionally provoking. but of course, that's my point of view.
i used to not like his works when i was younger, but for some reason, all of a sudden i found something "magical" about his paintings that got in touch with my subconcious self. i honestly cant pin point what exactly i like about his paintings conciously, i just like them.
i like the layers of color and the texture and the depth some of his paintings have. it's creates this vortex of emotions and history and life and death...everything, a big mess!
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I like wallpaper and mood rings so I guess that makes me a pollock fan.
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One thing that struck me about Pollock's paintings in this film was how different they are from each other (I mean within the drip-paint pieces). I would never have guessed how such simple elements could combine in so many different ways, and yield such different 'feels'. I think noticing this is a good lead-in for coming to understand why his paintings were so important in the art world, because it shows the depth of intention - purpose - of the artist.
shareI can't believe people still think this way.
shareI have an Academician title in fine art, make my living as an artist/painter and may be I can give you the widest range of answer. Art is a very vague term and has gained a daily expanding coverage of meaning. I will give you 3 views.
In the sense of art being a composition made by an artist from his thoughts, observations and emotion; internal and/or external using skill, technique and methods Pollock's work is nonsense. Any real artist/ painter with knowledge and skill of those above can tell you there is really no intelligent decision in it. As far as a new method it certainly is and if he had done the drips in one or two pieces as a discovery/ experimentation then it would have been an interesting part. For this part refer to the "Jackson, you cracked it wide open."
Looking at it from the direction that art is in the eye of beholder just refer to what he says in the interview: "You look at a patch of flowers and enjoy it, you don't tear your hair out about what it means." If it pleases you or invokes other feelings in you without thinking how it was done then that is what it is. Decoration art or furnishing.
Now comes the brute reality of the fact that it is not about art but autographs. Refer to a quote from "Incognito"; "any idiot can paint a painting, it takes a genius to sell it." Combine that with the other posts about finger painting and the white composition in the museum, elephants and monkeys painting and you have it. Art is what the art dealers make it to be. With correct promotion and hype Peggy Guggenheim and the rest of the NY art community turned the spaghetti into gold. If a Rembrandt is worth $12-30 million how can someone pay $150 mill for Pollock #5? Simple and ingenious ... it is much more simple and easy to convince someone that an abstract mix of paint is a great piece of art than a painting that has meaning. You can argue composition, color, anatomy, technique, etc. but what can you say about the spagethi or Rothko's rectangles?
I have dealt with many of art dealers and have shared their jokes and laughs (in the cellar and back rooms) about people of money and status who stare at a canvas of "modern art" and shake their heads in admiration and approval just so that they are not behind their colleagues in being modern and understanding high thinkers.
Pollock works are beautyfull, although they don`t go far from design, i see him more as a designer than an artist.
He did a skeleton of what someday can be transformed into art.
To explain better, he expressed that in all chaos there`s order, but you can also see that watching a barf & all its elements spreaded with certain equilibrium, with certain "friendly" geometry between them.
So his work may seems randomly, & IT IS! (would be impossible for him to duplicate exactly one of his works, therefore proving that point)
Happens the same with mondrian, he began as an artist & ended up as a designer.
He is not giving us something that we can see, but a clue about something that one day a great skilled artist will be able to put as a true realistic image of a dimension far than the third, but not in a cubist way because cubism is also design. (although more closely related to art).
art = rembrandt, van gogh, escher, vermeer, etc etc
design = mondrian, pollock, vasarelly, etc etc
art-design = matisse, picasso, late escher, etc
When you make a fusion between design & art something like cubism/artnouveau is
born.
Art always has to be about something that we can decode for ourselves in our relation with nature, without having to slave our mind to the artificial creation of the artist.
Art has a very close link to science.
After impressionism most art became art-design (artnouveau, cubism) & ending up in pure design like minimalism & abstract expressionism.
I really enjoyed reading this thread, it helped me understand the creative process of modern artists. However, I don't care for it and I would not want it on my walls.
shareI agree with Ivan's comments, posted 12/21/07. Basically, a lot of modern art has to do with a relatively small network of critics and dealers who convince wealthy people to spend a lot of money on "the latest thing", so that they can impress their friends (and themselves) with how "with it" they are. For more on this line of thinking, see Tom Wolfe's excellent book, "The Painted Word"-- you will never look at modern art in the same way after you have read this book.
(By the way, I do NOT reject all modern or post-modern art, but I have become more skeptical of it over the years.)
Another BTW-- I thought the film was great. Kudos to Ed Harris for putting heart and soul into a brilliant portrayal of this controversial artist. I am currently reading the biography on de Kooning (it's excellent!), and I may have to take another look at this film to see it from the more detailed perspective on mid-20th century NY modern art that I have gotten from reading the de Kooning book.
It's quite a cynical view, and would maybe make sense if it weren't for the fact that artists actually do value and learn from Action Painters, Color Field Painters, Minimalist artists alongside Tiepolo, Watteau, and Goya, Even if there are just money grubbing gallery owners pushing for questionable objects in the contemporary art dialogue.
It's interesting that very few people here actually talk about the physical qualities of Pollock's or other abstract expressionists' paintings. Which leads me to believe that many have not actually experienced them in person. For all the claims that the paintings are about some inner psyche, there are very few mentions of the paintings' sheer physicality. The epic scale of the work overwhelm and encompasses the viewer in large field of paint in a way that a smaller European easel painting can't. And as opposed to the illusionistic depth of European painting created by atmospheric effects, linear perspective, color temperature and to a certain extent textural modelling; Pollock's paintings create a more literal surface depth by physically layering the marks. Thus 'drawing' is freed from its usual purpose in delineating form (which also happens here and there with impressionist works in which mark making is given more free reign rather than being confined to line). To be confronted with a Pollock painting is to deal with a very primal and physical experience which to a certain extent denies the logic of language. I think that is why many people posted feelings about the paintings along the lines of "it really affected me but I can't explain why". To me the reason they are good paintings isn't because of their historical context but simply because they are painted well within the goals and effects they are trying to achieve. The paintings of many of the abstract expressionists set the conditions of their paintings up in such a way that instead of mimicking or interpreting perception they are actually physically creating perception ( Rothko's color fields don't describe light so much as they use color relationships and surface textures to create it). What makes them "art" is the fact that they transcend the paint, and people can evoke the aforementioned inner psyche/ collective unconscious/ sexual expression (aka drips as semen) interpretations from them; whereas I'm not usually compelled to interpret wall paper or mood rings.
That isn't to say that all of Pollock's work is good; the painting of his at the Art Institute of Chicago seems overworked and lacks the elegance of some of his other compositions. And it's evident from his struggle at the end of his career/life that drip painting and maybe more specifically all over compositions have their own set of dogmas and limitations, and he was a smart enough artist to try and break free from them ( if unsuccessfully). The more figurative impulses in his later work also go to show that it wasn't always the artists who were the dogmatists, though Clifford Still is pretty scary.
An appreciation for abstract art enhances an appreciation for representational art and vice versa. To put the two in opposition does a disservice to both. To use a pedestrian example, remember the scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when Cameron stares into the Seurat painting? He examines the painting until the brushstrokes themselves are the subject. You could say Cameron is "abstracting" the painting. Who is to say the care Georges Seurat took in constructing "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was any more or less than the care Jackson Pollock took constructing "Blue Poles"? All art is abstract if you break it down into its components.
To put it another way, you can stare up at the clouds and look for the shape of a rabbit or a church, or you can stare up at the clouds and marvel at the clouds as clouds.
Ivan-308, awesome post.
Thank you.
Honour thy parents. They were hip to the groove too once you know.