Pollock
in the Hall of Fame.
In December 1956, New York’s Museum of
Modern Art hosted an exhibition that was as much a celebration of Jackson
Pollock’s life as it was a retrospective study of his art. Pollock had died
four months earlier and MoMA’s marking of the artist’s passing underlines how
seriously the gallery took his work and the shockwaves it had sent out across
America and the Atlantic Ocean.
Pollock was only 44 by the time of his
death but the wildly innovative approach to painting that he’d perfected
between 1947 and 1950 – in what has become known as his ‘drip period’ - had
established him as a superstar of the New York art world as well as an
intriguing if not perplexing fixation of the US media. The challenging nature of his work and his
own personal fierce charisma made him a regular subject for feature writers and
critics in TIME and LIFE as well as a number of high profile
and acclaimed showings at MoMA.
Since his death, Pollock’s stature as both
a great artist and a modern American icon has only grown in its magnitude. Along with the enigmatic portrait of a
spectral Warhol in dark glasses, Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock brooding
over a paint struck canvas have become definitive images in the technicolour
narrative of American culture whilst Pollock’s mythic reputation as a reclusive
and troubled genius has also allowed commentators from historians to actors to
claim him as a quintessentially rugged example of American individualism.
The problem with Pollock’s induction into
the Hall of Fame for All-American Mavericks - where the brooding poses of John
Wayne and James Dean guard the entrance - is that it allows the cult of his
personality to undermine the gravity of his creative brilliance. Pollock’s art and its relationship to
American life in the turbulence of the mid-twentieth century is both troubling
and complex. The image of him as a
pin-up for those who wish to export the notion of American individualism and exceptionalism
and champion the First Amendment above all else is certainly one that is worthy
of suspicion. Although it is obviously politically motivated - bearing the scars
of the ideological battlegrounds of the Cold War – it is also a simplistic
rendering of the man that undermines the sheer complexity of his art and as a
result, his genius.
Paintings like No. 5, 1948 (1948) and No. 1,
1950 (1950) with their complete rejection of figurative imagery and their
embrace of dramatic textures cut savagely by fraught lines of explosive colour
are impossible to fix with any one interpretation. Do they reflect the speed of
modernity refracted in the electric skyline of Manhattan
It is a testament to the intensity of
Pollock’s art that all these readings are possible, though it is exactly this
intensity that eclipses everything else in his painting. The sheer scale and force of a piece like No. 31, 1950 (1950) is what makes a
multitude of meanings possible as the work presents an occasion for subjective
experience rather than objective interpretation. It is Pollock’s almost primal approach to the
act of painting that reveals his genius because in an age where even the most
banal aspects of culture were being politicised he was able to present a form
of artistic expression that was genuinely uncompromising. The irony here however is that Pollock’s
radical refusal to facilitate linear and simplistic interpretations through his
paintings also creates a narrative absence that actually allows the potent myth
of his celebrity to distort the viewer’s subjective and instinctive experience
of the artwork itself.
Pollock’s status as both a preeminent
figure of the avant-garde confronting mainstream culture and as an American
icon rooted firmly in it presents a paradox that is emblematic of a
particularly volatile time in American history where the country needed figures
that symbolised the qualities of democracy.
The fact that leaders of the American avant-garde like Pollock, William
Burroughs and John Cage were capable of being subversive (and even explicitly
transgressive in Burroughs’ case) only served to ensure their eventual
canonisation as it allowed politicians, historians and critics to point to
these artists as proof that an egalitarian state could tolerate dissenting
voices in ways that their ideological enemies never could. This recontextualising of the American avant-garde
as Liberal celebrities embodying all-American values would undermine the power
of the art were it believable – Pollock’s work transcends politics and the time
it was created in and thus carves the fault line in this narrative.
Despite Pollock’s emergence as an American
icon and what this may say about how nations construct their own myths for
explicitly ideological reasons, the tension between the man’s idealised image
with his art’s multifarious treatment of meaning ultimately serves to undermine
the assumptions inherent in any kind of idealism. It is also analogous to the
contradictions implicit in American culture and rhetoric because although
Pollock’s search for a mode of uninhibited artistic expression is an inherently
optimistic act, it is complicated by the intimidating mood and intensity of his
work and the knowledge of his personal demons.
This tension between optimism and
intimidation, or hope and fear, is central to Pollock’s art. It is possible to
understand this as a parallel to the constant battle of promise and volatility,
faith and despair that have characterised American society in the twentieth
century.
It is in somehow embodying the dualities
and the complexities of his country as it forges a meaning for itself in the
world, rather than the facile image of the painter as a rugged all American individualist that makes Pollock a truly great
American artist.
Gallery Violet.
www.galleryviolet.com
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