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SPEAKER 1: We're still on the fourth floor of The Museum
of Modern Art and we're standing in front of Jackson
Pollock's-- one of his great, seminal, signature works--
a painting called One: 31, 1950.
SPEAKER 2: That's a lot of numbers.
SPEAKER 1: You know, he made a real decision.
SPEAKER 2: Is it like Chopin?
You know, Nocturne No.
22?
SPEAKER 1: That's exactly what it is.
He had titled and, actually, he would occasionally
title again or sometimes accept the title
that his friends developed for a painting after it was finished,
but scholars have thought that Pollock numbered
because he wanted not to close down meaning.
He wanted the meaning to remain open
and that the system that was used by composers did that.
SPEAKER 2: Oh, that makes sense.
So he didn't want any text associated with this image--
SPEAKER 1: Right.
SPEAKER 2: --except something very open-ended.
SPEAKER 1: The same year that he produced this, in fact,
at the same time he produced this,
he produced Autumn Rhythm, which hangs up at the Met.
SPEAKER 2: Which does have a name.
SPEAKER 1: It does have a name.
And people look for the colors of fall.
They look for--
SPEAKER 2: The rhythm.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, exactly.
And then wonder what that is and it's a series of associations.
SPEAKER 2: A minute ago, when we walked into the room,
you said that you could tell when it was upside down, which
I don't think many people could do,
so that would mean that there's something very intentional
about the drips, and their direction,
and the form that this image takes, that I think
is probably lost on most viewers.
SPEAKER 1: That's a really interesting, I think,
complicated set of issues because when
we think of Pollock's drip paintings,
we-- I think quite rightfully-- think
of a kind of improvisation and these paintings are
kind of an improvisation.
SPEAKER 2: Like a jazz musician going off on a riff
SPEAKER 1: Right, exactly.
But that's same jazz musician probably knows
how to control a saxophone brilliantly.
And Pollock, I think, really understood
how to control the paint in incredibly unique ways.
SPEAKER 2: It's interesting that we
don't want to allow him that control.
SPEAKER 1: We love the idea of the artist as the idiot savant.
We want it with van Gogh.
We want it with everybody.
These people who are somehow brilliant in this very narrow
way.
But Pollock was very sophisticated visually
and really understood, I think, what he was up to.
SPEAKER 2: So how does top and bottom work here?
SPEAKER 1: Well, if you look at the canvas,
this is a huge canvas, first of all,
and it's one that he painted, of course, in the spring.
He painted horizontally, unstretched,
and unprimed on a piece of raw canvas with cotton duck.
And he walked around the canvas quite famously.
Certainly, there's been many photographic documentations
of him painting.
But if you look at the painting, he actually
really ordered the canvas in some very particular ways.
First of all, the density of the paint is towards the center
and there really is a frame around the edges.
SPEAKER 2: That's absolutely true.
SPEAKER 1: So that he knew exactly where he was going
and where he was ending.
But at the same time, the density
becomes most extreme a little bit more than a third
of the way up the canvas and, in fact,
there's a sort of a loose horizontal that's
about one third of the way up the canvas--
SPEAKER 2: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 1: --which in some ways functions to, I think,
anchor the canvas and give it a center of gravity that's
low rather than high so it doesn't feel unwieldy.
But in the classroom, if you take a slide of this painting
and flip it over, the painting falls apart.
SPEAKER 2: Really?
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
SPEAKER 2: I wish we could do that here.
Your mention of the horizontal, reminded me
of a horizon line, which is a funny thing
to think about because he's got the canvas flat on the floor,
there is no horizon line.
SPEAKER 1: I was consciously avoiding the word horizon line,
but--
SPEAKER 2: It's a pretty inevitable association here
though, I think.
SPEAKER 1: It is because we really do see a kind of space.
It's a way in which those schemes
of [? painter's ?] lines really fold into each other and become
this incredible sort of dense spacial [? tank. ?]
SPEAKER 2: It's very powerful to stand in front of it.
It feels very enveloping and around one,
even though one is standing separate from it.
SPEAKER 1: That's true.
I want to go back to this idea, though, of his intent
because there's been a lot of discussion.
His two great critical framers early on--
SPEAKER 2: Greenberg?
SPEAKER 1: Greenberg and Rosenberg
had very different views on what Pollock was doing.
And Rosenberg, very famously said
that what we're seeing in a museum is, in some sense,
just a fossil of the ritual work of art,
which was the act of making.
SPEAKER 2: The performance.
SPEAKER 1: The performative element itself.
Right.
Whereas Greenberg said, it only became a work of art
when it was lifted off the floor into the realm of the vertical
and entered into this continuum of the history of art.
SPEAKER 2: It's an interesting thing
because we're not looking at it the way
that the artist himself looked at it
and created it, which is probably
something that never happened before.
SPEAKER 1: Well, because of that, sometimes
I find myself going to the edge of the canvas
and cocking my head to the side so that I
can see across the canvas the way that Pollock would have.
It's a very different experience.
SPEAKER 2: I wonder how he kept both of those things
in his head.
SPEAKER 1: He was very conscious of what this would-- I
think-- he was very conscious of what this painting would look
like when it did reach the vertical.
SPEAKER 2: Well, he must have.
I mean he was speaking to a tradition of painting,
the history of painting.
SPEAKER 1: There's one case though
when he asked Tony Smith, who put together
some of his most important exhibitions,
to hang a painting horizontally on the ceiling
in a gallery [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 2: Really?
SPEAKER 1: Yeah.
SPEAKER 2: That's interesting.
SPEAKER 1: And so there was one case when you actually
would have looked across the canvas or at least up at it.
SPEAKER 2: You know, I'm looking now
and there are some people standing in front of it
and pretending that they're dripping
and the figures in front of that dense network of drips
and lines look so strange.
There's something, I don't know.
SPEAKER 1: There's very famous photographs of Vogue models,
actually, in front of these canvases
and they look incredibly striking.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
SPEAKER 1: There's so many ways to approach
this painting, but, I think, one of the things
that I think is most important to take away from Pollock,
is that this is not a canvas that's
about representing a vase of flowers, a human body.
It's really a painting that represents
the action and the activity of painting itself.
SPEAKER 2: The gesture.
SPEAKER 1: This is about--
SPEAKER 2: The painterly gesture?
SPEAKER 1: And the act of making.
But yes, gesture absolutely.
SPEAKER 2: So there's no paintbrush,
which is the thing that we think about when
we think about gesture.
SPEAKER 1: But think about it this way.
When you look at any of those individual lines of paint,
they get thicker and thinner and sometimes they pool.
When they pool, you get the sense
that Pollock stopped and the paint continued to drip.
When his arm moved slowly, you have a thicker line.
And when you have this thinning line, you know that he sped up.
So this becomes almost a kind of choreographic notation
where you can almost begin to reconstruct
how he moved around this.
And so in some sense it's a broader gesture.
It's not the gesture of the brush,
it's not the gesture even of the hand,
it's a gesture of the entire body.
SPEAKER 2: That's interesting because I can feel that,
but at the same time I feel a tension
because it looks like there's some way that
in it's multifariousness and its density
that it seems like a natural thing and not something that
was made.
SPEAKER 1: And that's, maybe, tying back
into the point you made earlier about us not wanting Pollock
to have been overly conscious.
We want this to, somehow, be an act of nature.
And, of course, that ties in beautifully
with this whole myth.
There's that very famous moment early in Pollock's career
when Lee Krasner, an extraordinary artist
in her own right and, of course, Pollock's wife,
would introduce him to Hans Hoffman,
the great German abstractionist.
Hoffman would say to Pollock, you
need to look more closely at nature,
when Hoffman was reviewing Pollock's earlier work,
and Pollock is said to have responded, I am nature.
SPEAKER 2: Wow, interesting.
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