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.