Jackson Pollock: The Uncertainty of Ritual

It's worth taking time to understand Pollock for several reasons.  He has generated a large body of interpretative and critical literature--theories which reflect the changing concerns and priorities of the art and social worlds.  In that respect, not only do they tell us about Pollock's art but they tell us about the way the social and historical context interacts with art.  His radical reformation of art fundamentally changed the parameters of the art world (as someone, Lee Krasner or Willem de Kooning, depending on whether you're watching the movie or reading the biography of de Kooning, once said to him, "you've cracked it wide open").  Pollock also gives rise to a large number of interpretations because there are so many visual sources we can find, none of which completely explain his art but all of which offer suggestive ideas about what he was trying to do.  In the long run, it may be less essential to decide if Pollock's dynamic compositions reflect the influence of Benton, Orozco, Albert Pinkham Ryder, of native American pictographs and sand painting, of Jungian symbols (all of which are viable and possible influences), than it is to recognize that each one brings a slightly different meaning to the work.  But it is in the interaction of these sources and the technque that the real meaning is found.
 
Pollock: Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952 (enamel, alum. paint, glass on canvas; 6'10x15'11)

Some of the possible influences on Pollock:

one of Thomas Hart Benton's teaching diagrams

In his teaching, Benton emphasized the idea of a spiraling form anchored to a vertical structure.  In Pollock's painting Blue Poles, we seem to see a literal manifestation of this idea.
 

Orozco: Legend of the Races, 1933 Pollock: untitled (naked man with knife), ca. 1938-40; o/c, 50 x 36"

As important as Benton is to the early Pollock, so is Orozco, as the two examples above indicate.
 

Hopi Kachina doll, made before 1959 painted reproduction of Navajo sand painting, before 1933 reconstruction of a 19th century Haida village with frontal poles

Many of the abstract expressionists shared the interest in native American imagery.  They saw it as an original and unique form of American art, and as a direct route to the archetypes of the unconscious.  Two surrealist theorists living in NY also promoted a turn to this imagery: John Graham and Wolfgang Paalen.   When we look at Pollock's work from the early 1940s, it's not clear if the lines we see are examples of automatist writing, pictographic imagery, or Jungian symbols.   What is clear is that he is experimenting with methods of moving away from the more figural style of Benton and Orozco, that he has adopted the shallow, architectonic space of cubism, and that his colors have been liberated from making references to nature.
 

Pollock: Stenographic Figure, 1942 (oil on linen) Pollock: Male and Female, 1942 (o/c)

The abstract expressionists reject the surrealist goal of letting the unconscious dictate the painting, but they do not reject the unconscious.  What, then, is the role of the unconscious in abstract expressionism, and what did Pollock mean when he said he "paints out of the unconscious?  Does the Guardians of the Secret give us some understanding of what the unconscious means to Pollock?
 

Pollock: Guardians of the Secret, 1943

The essential form of this painting is a slab-like structure with coded messages on it that cannot be read, and this slab is guarded by a pair of totemic like figures-probably male and female.  Dualities or opposites are central to Jungian imagery. The marks on the slab refuse legibility; they cannot be read. Thus, they do not equal the production of meaning; they equal, instead, the effect of meaning, which here is not readable, not comprehensible.  So what is being guarded?  Perhaps the secret is precicely that: secret meanings, or the unconscious, which is the repository of secret meanings and the generator of the forms which will be assumed by those meanings.  Another writer has pointed out the resemblance between Zia Pueblo altarpieces and ritual sand paintings, which are usually flanked or guarded by two clan officials, and this image, which was available in photographs in some of the materials that Pollock read and owned, could have played a part in the Guardians of the Secret, suggesting that this slab of unconscious meaning is really a ritual painting made for healing purposes and for that reason needs to be protected or guarded. These interpretations are not inconsistent with one another.  But I think the suggestion made by a student in one of my classes, that Pollock's "secret" may have been the new ideas he was beginning to form with respect to painting, and that the slab in the center signifies that secret painting, is intriguing and worthy of consideration.  Given that we see references to Male and Female on the sides of the painting and to the She-Wolf on the bottom, the only part of Guardians which is truly new is the center rectangle.

Pollock's transition

Pollock: untitled composition with pouring, 1, 1943; o/c, 36 x 44"
Pollock: Mural, 1943-4 (8'x19'9)
Pollock: Eyes in the Heat (Sounds in the Grass Series), 1946, o/c (50 x 43") Pollock: Full Fathom Five, 1947; oil and nails, tacks, etc., on canvas
(50 x 30")
Pollock: Number 1A, 1948 (oil and enamel on canvas; 68" x 8'8")
Pollock: Lavender Mist, Number 1, 1950 (7'3 x 9'10)
By 1950, when Pollock spoke about art, the artist, and the modern world, he used words which fit with a new, electrodynamic view of the unconscious:  "The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world-in other words-expressing the energy, the motion and other inner forces."  Pollock spoke about "energy and motion made visible; memories arrested in space; human needs and motives; and acceptance."  The Jungian model of the unconscious had popular appeal in the 1940s because it seemed to excuse people for the existence of irrational behaviors which they could not contro.  The electrodynamic model of the unconscious as "a flowing circuit of emotional energy...of convolutions..." had appeal as a model with scientific associations, a model which could lend itself to rational analysis. It made a direct contrast to the antirational and mystical model of the Jungian unconscious.
    Both models relate to the social dynamics of the late 40s, the ambivalences, horrors, and ambiguities felt by most people about the devastations of WWII.  All of these artists, who reject the more traditional means of depicting narratives in painting, used painterly strategies of negation, of disjunction, of opacity. What they create are layered narratives of ambivalence and boundaries and frustrations, with plots that are enigmatic and chaotic and at times, incomprehensible. Ultimately, these paintings contain a shifting balance between negation and assertion, between a desire to signify and a desire to erase.  In addition to the conflicted social context of the period, narratives and plots of negation and erasure may be another metaphor of the unconscious.

Technique in Pollock:
If technique results from the painting's need and the artist's need to be spontaneous, what is the technique?
Pollock’s line is liberated from its traditional figurative character; it does not structure space, it does not represent objects, it does not delineate or define figures or fields because there is only one field to the painting and it is a purely optical field with sheer visual quality and no other sensory qualities or appeal.  The line has been severed from its usual and normal function.  This type of derailment is something Pollock does to the other elements of painting as well.  Color is neither a recognizable characteristic of a surface or texture but it is not transparent or disembodied.  Then what is color in Pollock’s paintings?  It's difficult to know how to describe something that doesn't really exist as material substance and isn't being used in a familiar, descriptive fashion.  Finally, what we generally think of as the signs of the artist's hand, the identifiable marks which become a signature, so to speak, is the entire painting in a painting by Pollock.  The signs of touch do not signify the representation of something else but the painting instead, and overall, the painting does not appear to represent anything, or at least, anything known.
 

Pollock: untitled (cut-out), 1948-50 Pollock: Cathedral, 1947

If Pollock was trying to represent something which was not known, what is this unknown or unrecognizable something? The representation of something unknown creates a type of dissonance.   Dissonance is the opposite of illusion; it is expression, in a pure form.  When the world itself is characterized by dissonance, the only expression possible is the expression of suffering.  By this expressive quality and by the rejection of illusion, dissonance reveals the impossibility of harmony.  But if the paintings were only about dissonance, then they would have been mimetic paintings.  If part of Pollock’s enterprise is the attempt to prevent totalization, a totalization which would allow the viewer to read the painting as a single metaphor (of the unconscious, for example), then perhaps we can understand the disruptions which Pollock makes central to his paintings.  The sense of the presence of a figure without seeing a figure, the paintings which appear to let the figure return only to exterminate it again, the paintings which appear to have no defined beginning or ending: the refusal of anything definite.  The size of the paintings contributes to the sense of their capacity for endless expansion and therefore not being completed and contained.  The battle between figure and abstraction, in this light, is one element of a larger battle to be incomplete.  And the battle to be incomplete may be the closest we can come to a metaphor for the meaning of Pollock's paintings.
 

Pollock: No. 11A (black, white and gray), 1948 (oil, enamel and aluminum paint) Pollock: Number 31, 1949
Pollock: Autumn Rhythm, No. 30, 1950 (8'9 x 17'3)