Page 57 - The Documenta issue of World of Art magazine (2002)

the previous year, Pollock’s ability to release and register both physical and
psychological experience through pure painterly means had greatly increased.
using methods which recalled Siqueiros-working on the floor, pouring pigment
from a can,dripping it off of sticks, and imprinting his hand-Pollock achieved
effects Siqueiros had never dreamed of getting. By converting technique-and
its calligraphic evidence-into a primary and very visceral “means of arriving at
a statement,” Pollock succeeded in refocusing the viewer’s attention on how
a work has been created, as opposed to merely what it represents responding
with “his body-and-mind as a whole to the events of reality,” in the dripped
works for which he has become most famous, Pollock demonstrated a new way
to encode identity: by making-as he put it-his “energy and motion” visible in
pictorial space. Pollock once jotted down on a piece of paper the following words
(and they are very eloquent for a non-verbal ma experience of our age in terms
of painting-not an illustration of-(but the equivalent.) concentrated fluid and he
told a radio interviewer in 1950 that “modern painters cannot express this age,
the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the renaissance or
of any other past culture”; to express modernity, Pollock maintained, a painter
must “work from within.” not long before he died, Jackson Pollock made the
cryptic comment, ‘We’re all of us influenced by Freud, i guess. i’ve been a Jungian
for a long time.” What he probably meant to highlight in this assertion was a
firm conviction that collective meanings can best be framed by synthesizing
interior and exterior reality.

Jackson Pollock found his aesthetic identity by devising a way to reveal how
the universal is actually inherent in the autographic. his strength and his
influence as an artist stem in large measure from the indisputable fact that-on
every possible level, from image to technique-Pollock always “put himself in his
paintings.” not surprisingly, just as the examples of other artists so stimulated
Pollock, his own novel approach rapidly became truly critical to a wide range
of developments in mid-2oth century american art. the risks he took were
an indisputable inspiration. as Willem de Kooning, a friend and colleague, so
succinctly put it, “Jackson broke the ice” for acceptance of an entire group.
Pollock’s visibility, not only in galleries like Peggy Guggenheim’s, but also in
life and time magazine, at the prestigious Venice Biennales of the late ‘40s
and early ‘5os, and at far-away venues like the museo correr, paved the way
for the accomplishments of many now-celebrated american artists. motherwell,
de Kooning, mark rothko, adolph Gottlieb, Barnett newman, Franz Kline and
clyfford Still are among Pollock’s peers recognized world- wide as premier
abstract expressionists.

although she was not included in the life photograph by nina leen that has
achieved fame by canonizing these and others as the masters of american
postwar abstract painting, as the candiani center exhibition proves, Pollock’s
wife leeKrasner also deserves credit as a pioneering member of the originating
group.

For, she did not only play a critical role in encouraging Pollock’s radicality
(according to Greenberg, Krasner was the single most important influence on
Pollock’s ability to develop as a major painter), as i have written in two essays in
the catalogue, their artistic careers were profoundly and inextricably entwined.
POLLOCK is a crucial component of reassessing the cultural impact of Jackson Pollock’s
recognizing their identity as a couple and acknowledging her participatory role
america.i thank the organizers of this important event in italy for inviting me
to take part i am certain that visitors to the two exhibitions opening today in
Venice will be greatly enriched by experiencing these marvelous works of art.

World of art 55