Number 30

After writing the research papers; I started traveling a little bit around the east coast and I saw for the first time with my bare eyes Number 30 at the MET and I cried in silence. Since than I have been a Pollock fan trying to track him down, during my travels, and enjoy the symphony of (his) chaos. Below you will find a raw draft of one of my research papers, that I did in the summer of 2008, I just found the draft and in the upcoming days I will try to improve it and find the bibliography as well. My formal research paper was shipped to Parsons-New School of Design (nyc) and I don't have the original copy anymore. Please, (also) bare in mind while reading, that at the time I was a "joie de vivre" 16 year old. 

Exploring American Modern Art

“I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.”-Jackson Pollock

Modern Art is known as the area between the end of Impressionism and the beginning of Post-Modern. Technically Modern Art was the fusion of philosophy, actual life and rebellion. The power of the modern art has brought to the world diverse cultures got together to share the same space. Within that, the cultural bridge-builders are those astute people whose vision extends beyond monotonies, finding PHENOMENA- family members who have not yet connected.

 In 1907 was held in Paris the first Cubist exhibition. Where was he-Picasso? Picasso has spread his life in five periods: Blue Period, Rose Period, African-influenced Period, Cubism, Classicism andSurrealism. As we can see the middle one is African-influenced. In this case we aren’t talking about a getting to the roots need. From the Babylonia to the end of the Egyptian period Africa was the most important “color producing factory”. They painted everything and the cave art is one of the most influential. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) was a painting by African artifacts. Formal ideas developed during this period lead directly into the Cubism period that follows.

The first works of Jackson Pollock were experimented into the cubist influence. Did he succeed? Not that much, his all work was a commercial way of thinking. Suddenly, everything changed. The brushes disappeared and the canvases started to stay on the ground. He poured the painted to the canvas that were on the ground.

As the time passed he tried to push his boundaries further like, mixing paint with egg, minimum pieces of wood or stone and even using his own split as an ingredient. It was a way to be in the painting. He could walk around it, see it from the four sides and experiment with the life of the painting. 

The “Number 31” (1950) of Pollock was a big success for him. It occupied an entire wall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. In this painting Pollock mixed the theory of freedom with the one of order. If you look at all the four borders of the painting youwill see that they have nearly all the same way of painting. Black lines all over it. If you see the upper-middle part you will see the emptiness that surrounded the life of the painter. In the middle (not the exact one) is the part where the painting is more powerful. It looks like all the lines are trying to expand the binderies of the quadrangle and to find freedom. When I mean freedom the first thing that gets into my mind is the way that Native Americans celebrated their earth festivals. It looked like they were dancing in an order way for freedom. Pollock observed Indian(native American) sandpainting demonstrations in the 1940. Maybe this is why he used the sand yellow color as a background in the painting. There are minimum parts in the painting that are in red. The first think that went into my mind was, “Did he mixture even blood now?” Maybe who knows, I am looking forward for the explanation of the canvas.
As you can see with the passing from the cubist way of painting to the expressionist one, he also changed the way of naming the paintings. He got more into mathematic! All his paintings started to be named by numbers. The funniest way was that some people thought that this only a way to get the attention of the public. First the way that people thought about Pollock paintings was total chaos, but in a powerful way. “He just moves around, pours paint all over the floor and then names the painting”. If it was this simple. Pollock calculated the dimension of the canvas and all his lines and are expressing the theory of the mathematical chaos. Was he this bright? It looks he was. I need to say that even if his mind was “damaged” his way of thinking when it come to painting was totally controlled. He could give own life to every painting.

“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’ doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

Roy’s Lichtenstein early life was involved into the New York stock market crashes, the Great Depression. Maybe his all life was gained into this uncommercial way of being. How can they commercialize if they are into economical cries? The unusual thing is that he didn’t see his Pop Art Work as American but as an industrial painting. One of his best known works was Drowning Girl (1963). This paint was made in the same year when Martin Luther King gave the speech “I have a dream”. It looks very sad that the picture has not a connection with the dreaming part of Martin Luther King. The picture is portraits a sad girl crying and saying “I rather sink than call Brad for help”. 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  At the end at the 1970 or better at 1979 Roy Lichtenstein promoted his new famous painting “Pow Wow”.  

Pow-Wow→ American Indian ceremony or gathering of various kinds. Powwows originally were healing ceremonies, but the word could also refer to exuberant celebrations, with dancing and singing, of success in hunting or victory in battle. Meetings of tribal councils were also called powwows. Today the word is used for large-scale Indian social gatherings, often representing more than one tribe, with traditional drumming, singing, and dancing. Modern powwows draw tourists as well as participants, and craft items and souvenirs are offered for sale.

Here we can see that even that at first he described his Pop Art as ‘not American”, he dedicated an whole painting to this culture. At the left-upper side we can see a big purple eye. The eye in the native American culture has two meanings. One is “buffalo eye→ alertness” an at the other side “medicine man’s eye→ wisdom”. If we see the meaning of purple in Western Culture is ”purple→ sorrow and suffering”. Two meanings get together by one pale color!

  “Abstract Expressionists put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don’t come out looking calligraphic like Pollock’s.”

Within the past fifteen years, many urban subcultures have joined together to become something larger, more powerful, and more pervasive than ever before. This new street culture encompasses juggernauts like hip-hop and punk as well as much smaller but equally inspiring subcultures endemic to the streets of mega-cities. From the skateboarders projecting themselves off every corner and surface to the graffiti and street artists risking arrest to put their work on them, the frenetic evolution of fashion rising from punk and hip-hop’s many subculture to the constant backdrop of music, cityscape, and…..

Street culture is a traveler. In 1960 Garry Winogrand begins photographing women in the streets of New York.  Adobe Photoshop was released in 1990, the images become more powerful but at the same time also more vibrant and cheaters like, the way of moving around, is. For some people photography is a vacation; for others, something else: a pastime, a reflex, or a part of their greater creative whole as designers, skateboarders, artists, or publishers.Some of the most pervasive and popular street cultures, began in particular cities and at identifiable points in time. At the same time, when looked at more broadly, their roots are as old as any in recorded history. Looking at hip-hop through the  narrow lens, for instance, we can see it starting in the late 1960s into the 19070s with neighborhood block parties and James Brown’s famous rap-speaker. But through a broader lens, as extensions of visual art, dance, music  and poetry, hip-hop is a far older creature. The idea of riding a plank held up by wheels must be nearly as old as the wheel itself, but skateboards in name themselves date to California in the 1950s, when surfers look to the streets and fused their sport with roller-skating. 

Tattooing has been around as a part of various tribal cultures for the thousands of years, yet was only introduced to the West in the 1800s. It tattooing only exploded in popularity out of sub cultural status in more recent years, and only then because it became widely accepted as an art form and not strictly reserved for sailors, bikers, punks and the like. Covering on self bling jewelry is a modern trend but certainly not a new practice- just one that’s no longer reserved for royalty. There is at the same time nothing, and everything, new under the sun!