[kid cue]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

one thing that kind of strikes me as paradoxical in your thoughts is that you don't allow for pollock to be speaking an "obtuse language to express an arcane worldview" but you also admit that you have no choice but to accept that "his art is an extension of himself." I'd argue that this extension is too similar to one's worldview. to debate this would require we drudge up all the nuanced differences of the world's affects and one's opinion of it and one's "self"

i have to consider Pollock's obtuse methods as an extension of himself because he demonstrated through example that these methods could produce great results. these great results are radical paintings that are incredible visually, emotionally, physically, and intellectually. as an artistic sensibility, i don't see why these horizontal splatter-gestures need to have anything to do with a "worldview".

in a sense, we're both talking about authenticity, but mine is more about the artist's methods vis-a-vis their manifestation in the work (whether the approach works artistically), while yours seems to be about relationship between the artist's claims and how these are expressed (whether the approach literally makes sense)....

The fact that you "have to accept" means it's kind of giving the benefit of the doubt for lack of contrary evidence that it isn't an extension of his "self". but I have to ask: who is Jackson Pollock anyway? what is his self? How is this communicated to you as the audience so that you have a certain understanding? So that you feel something was communicated?

i only see Pollock's "self" tangentially--in his methods. i don't feel the need to connect his artwork with any concept of who he was as a person, because the work is its own entity. i look at the work and then i stop. i might conjecture as to what kind of person he was, but it seems almost irrelevant to me. he left this work, and this work is what i care about.

But because there are no visual clues, no common, shared iconography, its kind of a crap shoot what that visceral power entails and what its nature is. Is it hopeful, is it a staggering critique on racism? Is it expressing his jubilence at being alive? No it isn't so important that the paintings are any of these things, but it is important to know what they actually are.

why must visceral power need to be attached to a "critique", a theme about Pollock's life, or a one-word emotion? it is what it is; that is its nature. we know what these paintings are--we are looking right at them. they are incredibly pure that way. they are also great in that they still allow us to make connections to other ideas, but ultimately, these connections are irrelevant to the bare, physical, visual facts of the paintings themselves. they are about a pure visuality. Pollock worked the way he did because he cared about the way his methods looked. i once took a course in which we looked at some Pollock under UV light, and saw that he had actually extended & embellished his some of his gestures after the splattering with a small paintbrush, which is more proof than we actually needed to show that what he cared about was how the paintings literally looked--i mean composition, surface, texture, rhythm, etc.

This is the problem with the abstract expressionism movement as a whole. Its esotericism is the ultimate form of selfism, a demand that the audience shouldn't even be bothered or trusted to understand the meaning. They should just sit back and enjoy it, like the sounds of humpback whales communicating. It's supposed to be freeing to the artist to more perfectly express themselves, because they are no longer fettered by the ambiguities of a shared language. but this is a cop out, imho. And at best we can say that the movement was important, it brought up several questions about the relationship between artist and audience, but the answer was that art was required to move on, to accept the responsibility of communicating something. To intend to communicate something.

i disagree with this 100%. the "meaning" of an abstract expressionist painting is exactly, literally, what the audience sees before them. the extent to which the audience "understands" this relates directly to their visual fluency with the painting medium. it has nothing to do with being able to deconstruct the artist or his intent, as if his visual gestures are supposed to contain some kind of symbolism that simply isn't there, and supposedly should be. i don't agree with that at all. this seems like an act of projecting certain arbitrary notions about what art is or should be, to justify not understanding a given artwork on those arbitrary terms.

music is inherently 100% abstract and no one tries to make these arguments, because the emotional effect of sound is more intuitive to most than that of sight.

If for no other reason than how obvious it is that these artists were *not trying* to be meaningful to us. That was tangential to the point of the art.

well, i agree--because your "meaningful" is not their "meaningful". how can this be a crime?

Art is a language. Its intention should be to communicate. My favorite artists are those who have said something to me and I know what they said. I understand their world (which is also the world I live in) more clearly because of them.

i would probably say the same, except i get the feeling that your understanding of this phenomenon is a lot more right-brained than mine, going on the critique you've spun in this post.

But to me it's important that the art should speak so clearly that you wouldn't even need to query the artists intentions external to experiencing the art. The degree to which you need to is the degree to which the art failed to express itself in its own language. In this line of thinking, art truly exists as an independent entity - the existence of the art's meaning is not dependent on the existence of the artist.

this is one exact reason i feel Pollock's work is so amazing and successful. as intricate and esoteric as it is, its effect is absolutely clear. it--the paintings themselves, not so much ideas that can be reduced & expressed on paper--is forceful, joyous, conflicted, ambitious, etc etc. IMO any attempt to reduce this to a specific theme or idea would contradict the fundamental notion of art. and again, i don't feel as if i'm letting myself understand something less clearly than i want to (i.e. giving the artist the 'benefit of the doubt') -- far from it -- the language of art such as Pollock's is not "its own"; it's a universal language because it's purely abstract. at least, that is probably what all abstract expressionists believed, and what i certainly believe too. that art can be understood without being coded.

But none of this was the intention of the sunset. Just like a lot of how we experience art is not the intention of the artist. We don't call the sunset art because there was no intent behind it to be art. beautiful yes, but not art. Likewise we can judge art by its ability to evoke what the artist intended. (not to mention judge our ability to be open to the experience)

okay, but for those of us who prefer to experience art independently of its purported intent, i don't see why the sunset or any of the below matters.

so yes the two pursuits are different and should be. But the fact that you have to go outside of the work to discover pretentiousness is not a problem with pretense being dependent on intent. It's a problem of the artist being incapable of expressing his intent. But a lot of the times, because of the dishonest core of pretense, the audience has no choice but to investigate the intentions of the artist because they are lying in their art. Britanny spears suggest virginal innocence at the same time having dancers lick sweat off her body. This is a clear pretense. A dishonest attempt to affect a reaction of blossoming womanhood at the delicate and dangerous point of being plucked. Moby packages detailed essays that read like instructions on how to see his art as pretentious with every album.

why did millions (incl. myself) enjoy "I'm A Slave 4 U"? was it because they weren't critically smart or astute enough to avoid being tricked by her pretensions at virginhood? or was it because we simply couldn't resist the pure pop pleasures generated by her superindustry? does it matter if Mobb Deep weren't really thugs and thus had no real right to rap about thug life? etc etc.... i have to run, but i know there are countless examples of good art that threatened to "lie" to the audience via your definition.......