No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez No chaos, damn it: A formal analysis of Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) and

the fallacies of traditional criticism While reactions to drip paintings by Jackson Pollock range from shallow and pedantic sermons about the true meaning, to scathing criticisms on the lack thereof, most people respond in one of two basic ways: either with confusion, disdain and rejection or with fascination, humility and perhaps even interpretation. However, the one common denominator between these two camps resides in the emotional responses which people have upon viewing a piece by Pollock. When thinking about a work such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) both the technical aspects of production as well as the ideological foundations behind its creation become central to any type of analysis. In contrast to those who seek to simply criticize and dismiss the work as meaningless and unintelligible, the central thesis here is that Autumn Rhythm effectively transmits exactly what it was intended to; that is, to convey a feeling and elicit a response from viewers beyond the traditional stop, stare and move on reaction that occurs all to often with representational art. With the ideological and technical background in mind, a formal analysis allows for a vision that moves past shallow criticisms and towards meaningful interpretation. After living in various locations throughout the Western United States during his childhood, at age 18 Jackson Pollock moved to New York City. In his early artistic career he was taken as a pupil by Thomas Benton and was highly influenced by the Mexican muralists, Orozco and Rivera specifically (Pollock, Jackson). His paintings did not become truly abstract until 1946 and he first used the drip technique that would define his legacy in 1947. In technical production, Pollock defied almost every tradition by placing the canvas on the floor, utilizing tools such as sticks, trowels, knivesbroken

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez glass, and other foreign matter, by leaving the canvas untouched by his brush and by using enamel house paint rather than artists oils due to their more fluid nature (Goodnough 2). Pollock comments, On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting (Life 42-45). Indeed, photographs by Hans Namuth show him pacing deliberately around the canvas and applying paint with active motions to create the energetic feelings that almost seep out of his drip paintings. While Pollock denied any reproducible methodology in his drip work, Goodnough characterizes the process of creation as occurring in three principal stages. During the first phase, Pollock would utilize the surrealist method of automatism in which he would lay the canvas flat on the floor and begin to apply the base layer. Pollock declares, I dont make sketcheswhen Im in my painting, Im not aware of what Im doing. It is only after a sort of get acquainted period that I see what I have been about (Pollock). In this second stage of getting acquainted, Pollock would begin by thinking about it [the painting] and getting used to it so that he might tell what needed to be done to increase its strength, ultimately making a certain number of changes, and then pinning it up against the wall to consider it from a different vantage point (Goodnough 2). Goodnough takes time out to highlight the fact that in the final stage work on the painting was slow and deliberate. The design had become exceedingly complex and had to be brought to a state of complete organization. When finished and free from himself the painting would record a released experience (3). While many see a painting like Autumn Rhythm and immediately think it had a very quick and haphazard production,

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez Pollock placed a strong of emphasis on thinking about both content and form of his paintings. While the technical modes of production are important, there is an underlying ideology that highlights the reasoning behind them. In contrast to traditional painting, which Pollock saw as largely representational, Pollock sought to create compositions that expressed feelings rather than objects, works that were physical manifestations of emotional realities. He comments that his painting works at expressing an inner world, expressing the energy, the motion and the inner form. Further, he affirms that rather than attempting to create illusion of reality the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating (Wright 2). This emphasis on expression over representation places Pollocks work in an entirely separate realm from the canon of western painting (hence the abstract) and even more challenges both critics and viewers to move past traditional reactions and towards individualized interpretation. In this context of energy, action, and emotion we can begin to consider Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), a painting that reflects much of Pollocks ideology as well as technique. Before the content, the actual form of the painting strikes viewers first. Its massive dimensions prove to be greater than our field of vision and the unprimed canvas illustrates the very raw nature of the composition. In order to view the entirety of Autumn Rhythm, we must stand a few yards away, yet this act of distancing dilutes the content as the work loses all real intelligibility from a distance; it becomes a jumbled mass of color. These feelings of confusion and frustration ultimately force viewers to move closer to the painting and in the process examine the more subtle details that define it

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez In Autumn Rhythm, Pollock began with an initial linear skeleton of only black paint, that was diluted, so that it soaked into the length of unprimed canvas, thereby inextricably joining image and support (Autumn Rhythm). While the black dominates the majority of the painting, Pollock creates a complex web of color and effectively incorporates the brown, white, and turquoise. The composition challenges viewers to parse out the layering amidst the tangle of lines, spots, and bursts of paint. While it is extremely easy to dismiss Pollocks technique as amateurish and haphazard, he himself affirms, with experienceit seems to be possible to control the flow of the paint, to a great extent (Wright 2). The ambiguity of the layering plays with the traditional notion of atmospheric representation to create a work that is constantly destabilizing the viewer. Rather than create atmosphere, Pollock destroys it and in the process creates a composition that not only exists independently of our reality, but also breaks into it. As Pollock so aptly says, abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you (Gayford and Wright 546). Many of Pollocks works lacked representational titles, and he referred to them as numbers, for instance the famous Number One: 31. For the drip paintings that did contain titles, friends often coined them after the painting was finished and if not they were named for easy referencing rather than representational value (Autumn Rhythm). Despite this, viewers can clearly see both elements of autumn and rhythm within the composition. First, with the earthy tones of brown, white, black and turquoise Pollock emphasizes the changing of seasons. He skillfully places turquoise paint within larger black strokes as if to emphasize the subtle and fading influence of plant life in the transition between summer and winter. With respect to rhythm, there is an extremely

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez lyrical quality to this work. As viewers read the painting an interesting play between horizontality and verticality becomes apparent. Along the horizontal axis Pollock repeats swooping oval like shapes across the canvas to give the viewer a sense of motion. On the vertical axis we see an upward transition from the dense bottom filled with circular lines, towards a more open space punctuated by abrupt splashes of paint and orthogonal lines. Above all, what one receives from Autumn Rhythm is a sense of immediacy and expression. The lack of subject matter, border, atmosphere and any apparent logic all serve to challenge viewers and in the process fosters a relationship between painting and observer based on individual interpretation rather than generalized meaning. The criticisms leveled against Pollock and the Abstract Expressionist art movement are numerous, but here we address a few of the most poignant, and perhaps unfounded. One of the most common affirmations is that the abstract nature of the art, renders it weak, and it becomes difficult to truly see technical value in a drip painting. While Pollocks work may lack technical rigor as defined by traditional value judgements, analyzing it from this perspective proves artificial as the movement sought to destroy the foundations of traditional forms. Limiting criticism to terms of aesthetic pleasure misinterprets the true goal of Pollocks work. It isnt meant to provide viewers with something pleasing to look at, that is the point of representational art, rather Pollock seeks to express a feeling and when displayed elicit an emotional reaction. Another prominent criticism comes from the notion that if the only one who can understand a painting (given its abstract nature) is the artist himself, it loses all real value. Canaday points out, the contemporary painter necessarily paints for himself, walled off by his fantastic self-consciousness in an isolation peculiar to the individual in historys

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez most crowded world (Canaday Word of Mouth). He goes further to say, one of the most irritating figures in the art world is the painter who turns up with a secret process. He is always a bad artist and seldom a good technician (Canaday Artists, Technique, and Expression). While Pollocks process was individualized, the affirmation that the act of creation should be something reproducible would in fact preclude almost all great works of art. Wrapped up in these criticisms is the idea that at a certain point abstract art becomes irrelevant to reality, that its lack of concrete reference alienates it from viewers and given this fact it will eventually become obsolete. Canaday affirms that this type of expression is a dead end because contemporary art is first of all something to talk about, not something to look atsomething else will come along and look goodor sound good, which is what countsfor a while (Canaday It Talks Too Good). This deadend criticism fails for one primary reason: Pollocks manifestation of abstract expressionism was not about technique as much as process. When we think about a future based on drip paintings, we must think in ideological rather than technical terms. As Pollock so aptly says naturally the result is the thingandit doesnt make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement (Wright 3). What the drip paintings did was to challenge artists to rethink their own processes, not create copies of Pollocks work. Criticism of abstract expressionism as a dead end takes this very central fact for granted, and proves to be entirely ineffectual. In a context where process, emotion and action are central, it becomes scarcely useful to analyze a work of Jackson Pollocks with respect to traditional esthetics. Indeed, as Rosenberg affirms, the critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvasis bound to seem a stranger. What differentiates Pollocks painting is the utter lack of illusion. Rather than attempting at a representation of an object or trying to capture a foreign reality in a rigidly controlled space, Pollock merely seeks expression. Analyzing and criticizing works such as Autumn Rhythm from the perspective of their similarity to tradition or judging them based on aesthetic qualities applicable to classical art becomes an exercise in futility. The true achievement of Pollock, if we can even qualify it in those terms, lies in his very rejection of tradition. Autumn Rhythm achieves exactly what he intended, it expresses. And while some may criticize it from the perspective that it is a circular and self-referencing exercise, the point is to extract individualized meaning. As Pollock himself affirms I think they [the viewers] should not look for, but look passivelyand 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 (Wright 1). When we view Autumn Rhythm we should not ask ourselves how it relates to the classical, renaissance, or baroque periods but rather consider it for what it is, a physical manifestation of emotion. Autumn Rhythm rejects imitation as a form of art, rather than attempting to capture material reality, Pollock embraces the fact that painting, is in fact, merely painting. He seeks to express rather than illustrate, to capture a feeling in time rather than an object. Robert Goodnough writes that Pollock is not concerned with representing a preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly, without interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objectsIt is not something that has lost contact with reality but might be called a synthesis of

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez countless contacts which have merely become refined in the area of motions during the act of painting (Goodnough 4). Just as Pollock did not know beforehand how a particular work would turn out, viewers dont leave Autumn Rhythm with the same feelings as when they first see it. The true value of this composition lies in its ability to elicit an emotional response from viewers. Too often, we enter museums and merely glance at representations of reality, of people, of fruit, of landscapes. But, when we see Autumn Rhythm, and other works by Pollock, we pause. And if we stop for a second we are challenged in an extremely refreshing way. The point isnt to search for meaning, the point is merely to take it what is before us and see what comes out.

Works Cited "Abstract Expressionism." Oxford Art Online: Grove Art Online. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T000252>. "Automatism." Oxford Art Online: Grove Art Online. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T005221>. "Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)." Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Collections. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/210009206>. Canaday, John. "Artists, Technique and Expression." The New York Times [NY] 7 May 1961. Print. Canaday, John. "Happy New Year: Thoughts on Critics and Certain Painters as the Season Opens." The New York Times [NY] 6 Sept. 1959. Print.

No chaos, damn it: Alex Mendez

Canaday, John. "It Talks Good: Story-Telling Is Taboo, But Painting Today Is an Adjunct to Words." The New York Times [NY] 6 Mar. 1960. Print. Canaday, John. "Word of Mouth: Four Abstract Painters Make a Brave Try at Explaining Their Ideas." The New York Times [NY] 3 Apr. 1960. Print. Gayford, Martin, and Karen Wright, eds. The Grove Book of Art Writing: Brilliant Words on Art from Pliny the Elder to Damien Hirst. New York: Grove, 2000. Print. Goodnough, Robert. "Pollock Paints a Picture." Art News (1951): 1-5. Print. Greenberg, Clement. Modernist Painting. Ed. Charles Harrison. Art in Theory. Ed. Paul Wood. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell Publ., 1990. 754-60. Print. "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Life. 8 Aug. 1949: 4245. Print. Pollock, Jackson. My Painting Possibilities Vol. 1, no 1, winter 1947-48. "Pollock, Jackson." Oxford Art Online: Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/benezit/B00144023?q=Autumn+Rhy thm&hbutton_search.x=0&hbutton_search.y=0&hbutton_search=search&source=oao_ga o&source=oao_benz&source=oao_t118&source=oao_t234&source=oao_t4&search=quic k&pos=4&_start=1#firsthit>. Rosenberg, Harold. The American Action Painters. Ed. Charles Harrison. Art in Theory. Ed. Paul Wood. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell Publ., 1990. 581-84. Print.

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Wood, Paul, Charles Harrison, and Harold Rosenberg. Art in Theory. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell Publ., 2003. Print. Wright, William. "Jackson Pollock: An Interview." Jackson Pollock: An Interview. Maria. Web. 30 Apr. 2012. <http://www.neiu.edu/~wbsieger/Art201/201Read/201-Pollock.pdf>.