on Pollock

Some brief thoughts on Jackson Pollock.

Pollock was extropic in a way; he blew painting apart in terms of composition and the relationship of medium to surface. Seeing his work many times, and thinking of it now, I see that it is the bits of raw canvas peeking through the slashes and skeins of paint that unify the pictures. Pollock's paintings attempt to establish a hegemony, where the paint, -or perhaps the hand of the paint, the impasto, asserts a focus over the ground. It denies its own structure in some ways, and to my mind this is what gives his paintings much of their power. Pollock's means of addressing this formal problem (in my opinion) was to remove the ground from the support (ie: the stretcher) altogether. But ultimately this did not prove a definitive answer; they had to be remounted to the frame, after all.

More importantly, there is a very formal play between activated space and static space in his work. I believe we can only see this recently, because we have a much different aesthetic sensibility and we can process significantly more visual information that we could in 20th century. Nevertheless, the work is vast, and I am still awed by it.

I am breaking down this visual hegemony. My paintings are entropic; I am taking Pollock's work and imploding it like an outdated Vegas hotel. There is a redistribution of visual power where one cannot immediately perceive "positive and negative" space or activated and static space; distinctions, -the fundamental means of human perception, are subsumed by the whole. The structure is not denied, it is re-purposed.