Order cannot laugh
They sat in neat lines
heads turned towards the left
sitting as they were put
All
except
one
that wriggled its bottom
twiddled its thumbs
rocked on its bum
and created a disarray
forcing the tidy ones
to rearrange themselves
around the mess
in a bid to hide
the chaos
and the sore thumb
laughed secretly
then out loud
and was still laughing
when they threw it out
and formed a new order.
heads turned towards the left
sitting as they were put
All
except
one
that wriggled its bottom
twiddled its thumbs
rocked on its bum
and created a disarray
forcing the tidy ones
to rearrange themselves
around the mess
in a bid to hide
the chaos
and the sore thumb
laughed secretly
then out loud
and was still laughing
when they threw it out
and formed a new order.
Lavender Mist, Number 1 - Jackson Pollock
Genius, according to Charles Baudelaire, was a child's innocent receptivity combined with an adult's rational will. A generation later, in 1924, André Breton issued his "Surrealist Manifesto" in which he characterized the style as "pure psychic automatism through which it is intended to express ... the true functioning of thought." Surrealism "is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought." However, a subconscious dream mediated by coherent thought is not a dream at all; the surrealists' "anti-reason" was just a radical version of reason itself. Jackson Pollock, however, emphasized the psychic autonomous aspect of art in his "all-over" abstractions in which he dripped, dropped, poured, streaked, spattered, flung, or otherwise applied paint to his canvas on the floor as he jumped and swooped around it, lunged at it, stepped in it, circled it, using his whoe body to paint. Though the images invoke human emotion, the feelings they engender cannot be articulated. He had studied at the Art Students League in New York under Thomas Hart Benton and was probably influenced by his rhythmic use of paint. In 1936 the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros introduced him to the use of liquid paint, and Pollock became intrested in Native American sandpainting, in which the artists dropped their colors into place. In an unsuccessful effort to deal with his severe alcoholism, he underwent Jungian psychotherpy from 1938 through 1942 and started using hardened brushes, sticks, trowels, knives, and basting syringes to apply synthetic resin-based househod paints (alkyd enamels) instead of artist’s paints onto his gigantic canvases. sometimes adding sand, broken glass, or other foreign matter for texture. "“I am Nature,” he said. "My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.... When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." After 1951, though, he abruptly abaandoned his "drip period" and began paning in more conventional ways; however, he abandoned titles and simply numbered his paintings in order to allow an observer to "look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to be looking for." As his painter wife , Lee Krasner remarked, "Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting." In 1955 he stopped painting altogehter, although he tried to make wire, gauze, plaster constructions. In August 1956 he drunkenly crashed his Oldsmobile convertible and died; he was 44.
ReplyDeleteThank you Duane Vorhees. Love the commentary snippets you provide, they are riveting! I look forward to them.
ReplyDelete