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Friday, November 03, 2006

Jackson, You Can Pee in My Fireplace Any Time of the Day or Night - No.5 1984 - Jackson Pollock



Oh they are all excited. Pollock's 'No.5 1984' sold for 73.35 million english pounds.

Listen to this from The Independent in England: "Apocalyptic wallpaper: that was the brilliant phrase coined by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg, and it has stuck to Jackson Pollock's paintings ever since. It sums up the Pollock dilemma. Are these dense fields of looping drips and spatters profoundly meaningful - or profoundly meaningless?"

There's more.

"The composition was "all over". There was no image, of course, and no governing design or obvious focal points. Pollock abandoned handiwork, too. Dripping his paint from sticks and old brushes, he substituted gravity for touch.


The relationship between painter and painting was changed. The canvas was laid on the floor. It became an arena for action. What developed on the surface wasn't so much a picture as a record of spontaneously choreographed body movement, energy, reflex. When someone asked why he didn't work from nature, he replied simply: "I am nature."

Dead Beat too wondered about the notion of 'action painting', but when he got to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in the early Ninties and saw his first Pollock, he will attest to this, the governing design, the form, was there as it is always there in great works. Pollock was nature. He was that rare entity who could 'spontaneously' choreograph a work of art into being.

Dead Beat has seen his share of fine art but those huge paintings are quite simply the paintings that have had the most impact upon him.

Now you know me: Elvis practiced his sneer, the old Dadaists had a manifesto... and so on... so what for Pollock... he may be the exception, form being his life... I will think and ponder upon it. One thing is for certain, forget the money, the huge auction figures, think of a man in a studio, prowling, pondering, pouncing, splashing paint and splashing pain.

If you can do any one thing in your life, go and view a Pollock. Stand back and truly appreciate the profundity of meaningfulness.

Jackson, you can pee in my fireplace any time of the day or night.

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