Category: Jackson Pollock

Art and Intention

My friends ask what I have planned for the weekend; it’s part of the Friday small talk. “Oh, you know,” I answer, and they do. Every Sunday, I go to museums in Washington DC. They comment, “How nice,” or “How peaceful,” or “How beautiful.” I think they believe that I am some kind of sybarite, grabbing my croissant, then luxuriating in the presence of beautiful things. Maybe there’s a bit of that. Maybe.

Calder, Animals

It’s not just the company of beautiful things; I could just as easily take a walk in the woods—on occasion I do—or on the beach. With all its complexity and contradiction, nature puts me back in my place in the world; these britches won’t get too big. I’m only one part of the play. As far as it goes, I’m reminded of the Bible passages about the birds of the air that neither reap nor sow—nature strikes me that way. Yes, of course, great energies are expended—the gazelle dashing away from the lion’s maw; the salmon casting itself against the rapids; the seedling bursting through fire-charred earth—but reaping and sowing implies a plan. Nature happens without a plan, gods aside. It just does, even if it finds a way.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

Yes, there are accidents in museums—unplanned gestures captured in stone or on canvas. Pollock surely didn’t know where those drips would land, and when they landed, I suspect that he did not know precisely what shape they would take. But he knew they would land. Art is an intention, even when the artist trusts the random and accidental events surrounding their art. Some artists play with that idea.

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward.

Paul Klee

The line may not have a goal—the curve of the jib, the abrupt stop at the end of a nose, a bare limb of a tree in winter—but the artist does. Draw. Write. Make something.

Roxy Paine, Graft, 2008-2009

We keep making things. Their history is the history of intention.

A friend once commented that I never listened to the news, that I always had music playing in the car. I wish. I think I have paid inordinate attention to the news. In the morning, the first thing I do is rummage through the New York Times, as attentive as the man Thoreau criticizes for waking up after a half hour nap to exclaim, “What’s the news?” My rest is longer; my curiosity is commensurate with my rest. “History’s first draft” is a bleak reminder of how rarely intentions meet their desired ends in the world. It is a record of the misguided and misconstrued: proving how poorly we make decisions, how willing we are to follow some unexamined narrative. Music is another made-thing—Bach or Joni Mitchell, Radiohead or Michael Nyman—and stands in counterpoint to the news.

You may argue that some art is misguided and driven by poor decisions. I have friends who railed against Laurie Anderson, Morris Louis, and the Pixies on those grounds. Answers directed by personal preference (But I wanted Donald Trump to win re-election; But the CDC changed its guidelines; But I don’t like how beets look) can lead to all sorts of misguided conclusions. The repercussions vary from the grave (insurrection) to the frivolous (missing out on Chez Panisse’s borscht). Once you get over those prejudices, you see the pattern, and if you are of the mind to, you see your place in that pattern.

Basin (jian) with dragon interlace, Middle Eastern Zhou Dynasty, 500-450 BCE

My weekly wanders are not just a journey through a forest of intentions—I walk through orchards of fulfilled intentions. Oh, you did it this way. Butterfield, Monet, or some unnamed ironworker in China. Thousands of made things—intricately intended things made by human hands—each blaze like a beacon: “Here, find me here.” I learn by going where I have to go.

Hokusai’s Empty Spaces: a Lesson

Hokusai: Mad about Painting at the National Museum of Asian Art closes on January 9, 2022, so noting a few final thoughts on the exhibit seems fair. On Sundays, I pass these two paintings:       

This comparison is all but impossible—the two works connected by nothing other than personal preference—but let’s start easy. They are both paintings. They both have fairly restrained palettes, and each artist pays attention to line. After that, all bets are off.

These two works have more in common, although Corot’s Forest of Founatinebleau (1834) was painted within a dozen years of Hokusai’s Fisherman. Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) culminates a move in western art toward a kind of purity of effort. The subject is the painting itself—not the woman reading ensconced in nature—or even nature itself. No “meaning” interposes between the viewer and the image. Or any (and every) meaning is available; whatever you bring, the painting will match. “Take that!” it declares and sticks a finger in your eye. Corot’s painting also fills the frame, and we can decide whether the young woman reading by the brook is ignoring the world or opening a world. Either way, Corot, like Pollock, presents a world.

Hokusai’s painting does not. There is more unpainted area than painted. I run screaming from declarations of “negative capability,” or the value of stillness in Japanese art. I appreciate that the Hokusai show features paintings not by Hokusai to show what set him apart. The other works are busier, neither empty nor still. Besides, not all of Hokusai’s paintings are as open as The Fisherman (the fully inked prints from the One Hundred Poets series surge with color). However, as a rule, Hokusai leaves us some space.

Sometimes that space echoes with the noise of a crowd.

Another time that space is ready to be filled with storm.

Writers play with time and space too. The easy examples are Hamlet, when Shakespeare skirts away months in the course of the play’s running, or Macbeth, when the vast awfulness of Macbeth’s reign of terror happens in some interstitial realm. And nothing, when it happens in Beckett, is the point, and it is a crushing kind of nothingness.

What Hokusai manages is different. In part, it’s because he is a draftsman and a painter, and his work feels drawn as much as painted. But that’s not all. Often the main subjects of his painting occupy only a part of the field of the picture—the Thunder God hovers high, a wave, as water must, is bound to the bottom of the frame.

Nonetheless, Hokusai allows an image to float on its own. I find that when I look at something—a tree or a bird—and decide to photograph it, the photo is a poor representation of what I thought I saw. The tree is diminished in a landscape, and the bird disappears in a sea of grass. Hokusai’s paintings are like the kind of selective vision we have when we look at the world. We focus on one thing and dismiss—visually tuning out—what does not catch our attention. The photograph gives the lie to our selective vision; Hokusai lets us focus.

(Artist) Katsushika Hokusai

When he portrays a man gazing at a pot of peonies, he includes the man, the .pot of peonies, and the bit of earth on which the pot rests. Was the rest of the world there? Yes, of course, it was. In the same way that his screened mural of the two parties—one raucous, one contemplative—shows how we want to focus and cannot, his paintings are an exercise in focusing on what we might miss. Unlike a still life by Cezanne or Van Gogh, Hokusai directs us to look at the man who looks at the flowers—and the flowers. The Fisherman looks out at the ocean. The girl holds a letter behind her back and looks away from the evidence of what? We don’t know.

Hokusai shows us how we look. We might categorize what he does as minimalist, but I think that is a missed assessment. He focuses on what he sees, and he engages us to help us focus.

When we write—and this was bound to get around to writing—we write in the tradition of Corot, building a world, and the reader (the subject of Corot’s painting) is often dwarfed by that world. The world can do that. Hokusai shows us the value of focus. Choose the detail, the significant relationship, the single gesture. We have enough to distract us already. Focus.