Thoughts on Jackson Pollock and Modern Art

[hypnagogue]

While knowing the context can boost one's appreciation for any piece of art, knowing the context should not be a necessary condition for appreciation. If it is, then the art belongs in a book where it is presented in an integrated fashion with that context, rather than hanging barely on a museum wall.

It's like an inside joke. It's funny only if you know the context. So it's no surprise if customers feel cheated if the comedian they paid to see is only telling inside jokes.

 

[turbo]

By your definition, those are your hobbies. Those are not art. Art has a purpose and context. These have no purpose, message if you will, or context for society to interpret. Its just something you do because you enjoy it. Nothing wrong with it, but I would not put that in the realm of art.

If you constrain art so, nobody can be an artist unless they wear a smock, create just for the sheer joy of creating, and wait to be "discovered". Do you have a reason for this attitude? It is a singularly ignorant, ill-informed, and narrow view, IMO.

Edit by Ivan: Personal insult deleted.

 

[JasonRox]

Nah, I agree with Cyrus on this.

 

[Cyrus]

You are a fool. If you constrain art so, nobody can be an artist unless they wear a smock, create just for the sheer joy of creating, and wait to be "discovered". Do you have a reason for this attitude? It is a singularly ignorant, ill-informed, and narrow view, IMO.

Ummmm, I think you can afford me the same respect I give to you when I post here. I mean come on, seriously?...

Yeah, everyone is an artist. It reminds me of everyone being an engineer. As in: Building engineer -Janitor; Waste engineer - trash man, joe shmoe paints trees in his spare time, artist.

Dont belittle the word artist, please.

 

[Cyrus]

While knowing the context can boost one's appreciation for any piece of art, knowing the context should not be a necessary condition for appreciation. If it is, then the art belongs in a book where it is presented in an integrated fashion with that context, rather than hanging barely on a museum wall.

It's like an inside joke. It's funny only if you know the context. So it's no surprise if customers feel cheated if the comedian they paid to see is only telling inside jokes.

I think there is a balance you must have. You can't just walk into an installation blind and expect to get the same thing out of it as you would walking in knowing what the artist is about, and what he is trying to accomplish. But you don't want to be too jaded either.

 

[Cyrus]

So, what is your interpretation of art?

Something that has a definite meaning, context and message. It has nothing to do with what it actually looks like. Its about what the artist is trying to do with the space, what the meaning behind the work is, etc. Thats what makes something art, and not a bob ross landscape in a hotel lobby.

 

[wildman]

Wow! 77 posts on Pollock's painting. This was fun. Thanks all.

 

[hypnagogue]

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/3693/artwh8.png

meaning: to give a counterexample to Cyrus's definition of art
context: this thread
message: art is more than just meaning, context, and message

 

[Cyrus]

I'll give you a million bucks for it!

Of course it is more than just meaning, context and message. But that's one of the core things about art. It can't lack any of those things.

 

[hypnagogue]

But a good definition of a phenomenon can't just be a collection of necessary conditions. To be a worthwhile definition it needs sufficient conditions. To be a good artist, one needs a working heart and lungs, among other things. These are necessary conditions for being a good artist. But they are not sufficient conditions, and so ultimately they are not terribly informative about the nature of the thing we are trying to explain.

Of course even the necessary conditions you draft are dubious. What is the message of the Mona Lisa?

What is worse is that a message, context, and meaning can be fabricated for just about anything, making these criteria potentially meaningless. How do you falsify a proposition about a work of art's meaning? If you can just make anything up, then you can make anything meet these core criteria for art. If that's the case, you might as well not have them to begin with.

 

[zoobyshoe]

That title had nothing to do with you. It had to do with a discussion of art arising in a thread about pee splashing outside a toilet. But if it really bothers you, I will change it.

Thank you for changing it. It was an extremely undesirable title.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I think they just mean the level of fine detail. The general idea is that if a picture follows a 1/f power distribution, most of the picture is composed of lower frequency (lower detail) stuff and the more refined, detailed stuff comprises relatively less of the overall picture.

It could be you're right, but I can't tell from the article. The notion that something about the way we see a landscape is also employed by an artists in rendering a portrait, is intriguing, but I can't follow their train of thought: too many of the terms and concepts they use need explication.

 

[hypnagogue]

It could be you're right, but I can't tell from the article. The notion that something about the way we see a landscape is also employed by an artists in rendering a portrait, is intriguing, but I can't follow their train of thought: too many of the terms and concepts they use need explication.

What else is not clear?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Evo and turbo accurately reflect my thoughts, and Evo's comments were not harsh - just blunt and spot on.

Please, Astronuc. How much harsher can you get than calling something "bull sh!t"? It violates the PF guideleines against profanity.

Turbo called Pollock "crap". That's harsh.

Moonbear grossly insulted my thoughts on Pollock by sequestering them under her editorial comment "Art is like peeing on a fly". This violates the PF injunction against "snide remarks or phrases that appear to be an attempt to "put down" another member..." She has gathered all my well thought out remarks on Pollock and put them in a separate thread upon which she comments: "Art is like peeing on a fly."

 

[GeorginaS]

While knowing the context can boost one's appreciation for any piece of art, knowing the context should not be a necessary condition for appreciation. If it is, then the art belongs in a book where it is presented in an integrated fashion with that context, rather than hanging barely on a museum wall.

It's like an inside joke. It's funny only if you know the context. So it's no surprise if customers feel cheated if the comedian they paid to see is only telling inside jokes.

This is wonderfully insightful and can be carried over and applied to an awful lot of 'classic' literature. So much of it can't stand on its own without someone filling in a whole bunch of context to explain what the writer was attempting, why, what else was going on at the time, and how it was revolutionary. Which lends a certain appreciation, then, for the work in question, but I believe the work should continue to stand on its own as remarkable or enjoyable. I think you ought to be able to find emotional substance in any art even in the absence of hypnagogue's brilliantly apt 'inside joke'.

Zooby's initial post afforded me tremendous insight into what Pollock was attempting and under what constraints. I wasn't aware of any of that. And listening to Zooby talk about "paint as paint" was enlightening too. However, lacking all of that, there's too much 'inside joke', I think, for a majority of people to find an emotional substance to Pollock and any number of artists.

 

[zoobyshoe]

What else is not clear?

Untill I'm absolutely sure I know what they mean by "spatial complexity" I can't even determine what else I might not be sure of. The overall concept that the same way of visually analyzing a landscape is used in rendering faces is all I got out of it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Zooby's initial post afforded me tremendous insight into what Pollock was attempting and under what constraints. I wasn't aware of any of that. And listening to Zooby talk about "paint as paint" was enlightening too. However, lacking all of that, there's too much 'inside joke', I think, for a majority of people to find an emotional substance to Pollock and any number of artists.

Thank you so much for paying attention to the bit of historical context I posted. It's absolutly true that if you don't understand the context of anything it will appear to be nonsense. I am not asking anyone to like Pollock, just to understand that there is a valid basis for liking him. He is not supposed to be viewed the same way you look at Raphael or Goya. He is concerning himself with a whole different set of criteria.

 

[zoobyshoe]

While knowing the context can boost one's appreciation for any piece of art, knowing the context should not be a necessary condition for appreciation. If it is, then the art belongs in a book where it is presented in an integrated fashion with that context, rather than hanging barely on a museum wall.

It's like an inside joke. It's funny only if you know the context. So it's no surprise if customers feel cheated if the comedian they paid to see is only telling inside jokes.

This is all true, but, also all false. The museum or comedy venue has no control over who wanders in for the show and how much context they already understand. And, more importantly, you are as much the victim of context when you respond well to a work as when you respond poorly. "Good" works of art are only good, not because they don't need a context, but because they take good advantage of the context already in place.

Up to, and including, the Renaissance art became increasingly more realistic and the method of rendering perspective was developed. Each new step in art was greeted with approbation. Everything after that was the opposite: Artists that you and I take for granted as completely comprehensible and immediately pleasing to the eye were castigated and criticised by other artists and contemporary critics for their veering away from the then mainstream. I was amazed once to stumble on a vituperous bashing of Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black: the Artist's Mother, by a critic who tore is apart for compositional and color reasons, and found it to be an all around affront to good artistic taste.

Whister also got into trouble for the title:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler's_Mother

It looks fantastic and immediately accessible to us, but it was controversial at the time: "What?! Did he run out of everything but black and grey paint?? Why are the colors so dull? It's crap." sort of shock. People expect what they're used to.

Likewise, the impressionists, especially Monet, were positively shunned. Turbo and others may respond to Monet as obviously wonderful, but that is ONLY because of having grown up in an atmosphere where it's accepatible and encouraged to appreciate what he was up to. In 1880 Turbo would be calling it "crap" because he would have no means of processing it aesthetically by comparison to what preceeded it. It took many agonizing years for the impressionists to simply be examined with a calm eye to see what they were about. If you're used to Michelangelo the impressionists seem to be presenting unbelievably sloppy crap. People reject what they're not used to. In 1879, Monet was the "inside joke"that only he and a few others understood. People had immediate, powerfully negative, gut reactions to his paintings: the details are sloppy and unclean. He has broken the rules. But he persisted and eventually became accepted, and loved.


However: once the impressionists were accepted, people realized all the other rules were dead meat. If non-blended brush strokes that look like what they are: brush strokes, are good and not mere sloppiness, then what other "rules" are open to revision?

Indeed, the rest of the rules fell like dominos.

Pollock is remarkable, not for his breaking the rules but for his NOT breaking the rules. He found a way to obey all the strange new spoken and unspoken pressures now in place.

You cannot fault Pollock for not painting like Da Vinci: Monet killed da Vinci, and all that structure was already long dead and decomposed by the time Pollock came along.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Some reasons about why I like Pollock’s work (and why it I think it helps to have some idea of the inside joke). Apart from liking Pollock’s paintings for the energetic, painterly and textural qualities etc, like Zoobyshoe described, or take some of his remarks about art at that time further, this knowledge, too, adds to my enjoyment of Pollock’s paintings. (Although, I’m not saying his work is free of problems.)

As other things, a lot of visual art during the last century was strongly influenced by Freud and Jung, believing the unconscious superior to conscious awareness. The idea of an automatic out-pouring of the unconscious accessed in an alternative trance-like state of consciousness diverges from the surrealist’s portrayal of the unconscious, to the idea of an almost unmediated transfer of subconscious impulses with visual temporality.

And, although it seems Pollock was fostered by conservative forces, Marx was also influential particularly with pre ww2 art-cubism, futurism, dada, expressionism and surrealism, and Berger’s thesis describes their aim as ‘destroying autonomous bourgeois art’. This also incorporated an idea that ‘to be interesting is enough’( not sure, but I think it was Tristan Tzara who said that), whereas post war modernism was concerned with quality, associated with difficulty and distinction, ‘significant form’ (Bell) or ‘pure opticality’ (Greenburg), showing influences of more Kantian formalist autonomy.

‘As a historiographical method, formal analysis advances formal appearance as an objective referent to an artwork's meaning. The conjecture is that meaning itself begins and ends within the limits of an object's physical being. Objective fact presupposes aesthetic feeling. The self-contained nature of objective form reinforces Kant's definition of aesthetic subjectivity as the functioning of the distinct, yet interdependent, relations between objectivity and subjectivity. This is crucial to understand the way in which art historical discourse has tended to approach visual style in modern art since it distinctly captures the dialectical tension between those interpretive practices that have historically developed to explain it’
http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/britov/ess1.html

- hence Duchamp’s urinal, outside ideas of art being solely art. Kandinsky had attempted to paint music, Pollock goes much further by tracing dance, that is, I believe Pollock’s work also furthered this challenge to autonomy in a clever way by laying a comparably enormous canvas on the ground, and carrying out his action trance over the top and around it, thereby making his visual art secondary vestiges of dance.

Likewise, the cubists had involved the viewer more in their art. With distorted angles, and with clues, like a ‘real’ piece of newspaper within the work, encouraging the viewer to ‘read’ the painting, and simultaneously acknowledging it’s removal from ‘reality’, they slowed down the viewers perception process and helped the viewer to become more aware of it, and their own involvement. In many ways, for example, by presenting the viewer with a diagram of his creative processes, the all-over reading of the work (mentioned by slider 142), to participation in associations (explaining why I don’t think likening it to a splashed toilet seat is bad, although I see that it can offend), I think Pollock’s work also explores the viewer's status. To hypnagogue’s problem about the inside joke, I think it helps to have both an understanding and sensation to benefit most from this type of art.

 

[Astronuc]

Please, Astronuc. How much harsher can you get than calling something "bull sh!t"? It violates the PF guidelines against profanity.

Turbo called Pollock "crap". That's harsh.

Moonbear grossly insulted my thoughts on Pollock by sequestering them under her editorial comment "Art is like peeing on a fly". This violates the PF injunction against "snide remarks or phrases that appear to be an attempt to "put down" another member..." She has gathered all my well thought out remarks on Pollock and put them in a separate thread upon which she comments: "Art is like peeing on a fly."

I hadn't seen Moonbear's comments. Evo and turbo addressed Pollock's art, not one or one's opinion of Pollock's art. Evo later apologized for the way she expressed her opinion.

BS/c*@p are often used to express incredulity at what one perceives as nonsense. The comments weren't directed at an individual.

If art can be generalized to something that one can see, then Pollock's work certainly art, but then so is anything visual, particularly that which evokes emotion.

I'm left puzzled as to why people think some/many/most modern art is great art. I like what I like - regardless of what other's might think.

In the end, art like beauty, is in the eye or mind of the beholder.

BTW Zooby, you're pictures/portraits are exceptional art - waaaay much better than splotches and splatters!

 

[Evo]

Please, Astronuc. How much harsher can you get than calling something "bull sh!t"? It violates the PF guideleines against profanity.

If you had bothered to read my comment, I was saying that being able to tell what percentage of spatters and drippings were random was BS as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't referring to Pollack or his work, but to the comment about some study. I deleted my remark if it offends you so much, but if you go back and look at my post, you'll see you misinterpreted it.

Turbo called Pollock "crap". That's harsh.

And to a lot of people, that is a common opinion of his work. People have a right to their opinion. Now if they were saying you were cr@p for liking it, that would be different.

Moonbear grossly insulted my thoughts on Pollock by sequestering them under her editorial comment "Art is like peeing on a fly". This violates the PF injunction against "snide remarks or phrases that appear to be an attempt to "put down" another member..." She has gathered all my well thought out remarks on Pollock and put them in a separate thread upon which she comments: "Art is like peeing on a fly."

She did no such thing. You had started discussing art in a thread about peeing in a toilet. She thought the discussion merited being moved out of that thread and created a new thread to continue your discussion. She was not directing anything at you personally, it was actually a compliment. You seem to be mistaking everything as an attack on you and that's not true. I apologized for being harsh with my opinions. Did you apologize to Moonbear?

 

[turbo]

By your definition, those are your hobbies. Those are not art. Art has a purpose and context. These have no purpose, message if you will, or context for society to interpret. Its just something you do because you enjoy it. Nothing wrong with it, but I would not put that in the realm of art.

Cyrus, I apologize for my rudeness. I was pretty frustrated because you did not bother to address a single salient point in my post, including the requirement that art somehow connect the creator and the viewer.

As a musician, I performed many hundreds of times, and hosted open-mic jams so that non-professionals would have opportunities to perform and hone their skills. You can call it a hobby, if you want, but it's surely art to me, even when I was being well-paid to do it. If nothing is communicated between the artist and the person viewing/hearing the performance/painting, then there is minimal art content in my opinion. By the way, you did not tell me if you thought Barnett Newman's paintings were art or not. Google Image is just a click away.

 

[zoobyshoe]

She did no such thing. You had started discussing art in a thread about peeing in a toilet. She thought the discussion merited being moved out of that thread and created a new thread to continue your discussion. She was not directing anything at you personally, it was actually a compliment. You seem to be mistaking everything as an attack on you and that's not true. I apologized for being harsh with my opinions. Did you apologize to Moonbear?

Well, I haven't apologized, but I'll give her a compliment instead:

Moonbear's posts are like peeing on a fly.

 

[Moonbear]

Moonbear grossly insulted my thoughts on Pollock by sequestering them under her editorial comment "Art is like peeing on a fly". This violates the PF injunction against "snide remarks or phrases that appear to be an attempt to "put down" another member..." She has gathered all my well thought out remarks on Pollock and put them in a separate thread upon which she comments: "Art is like peeing on a fly."

Since you won't drop this...the title I had given the thread was based entirely on the thread it came from...one about urinal splatter! That you seek to attribute some deeper, hidden, emotional meaning to that title perhaps is appropriate to the rest of the discussion in this thread anyway, but I'll leave that for others to decide for themselves. And I clearly indicated right in the beginning of the thread here that the original title was one I took credit for, and was not your choice so there would be no mistaking that.

Critique of Pollock's work is not an insult to yourself unless you are Pollock. People are free to critique works in the public realm.

 

[Astronuc]

Time out!