Pollock: Inversion of Practice
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Through engaging with the literature to refine my draft essay (which began as a literature review of Muscalu assigned by Kathy), I have experienced several theoretical breakthroughs concerning Krauss's theories of despecification painting, one of which relates to Jackson Pollock. I propose that JP's practice represents an inversion of my own approach. To clarify, I began exploring how to introduce scale in my adhoc home darkroom during COVID by exposing prints as large as I could on the wall in my bedroom. The question then became how to develop them. Influenced by the work of Sigmar Polke and the Starn twins, I took the large sheets of exposed paper outside, pegged them vertically to the balcony walls, and utilised various “on hand” tools (such as crafting brushes and kitchen sponges) to apply chemical treatments. By incorporating novel methods and embracing chance, I serendipitously discovered effective ways to manifest material agency and my authorial intent within the work. Even after photo labs and darkroom spaces reopened following the pandemic, I continued to pursue these experimental analogue techniques and further developed my constraints-based model. In considering JP's methods, I speculate that he placed the canvas on the ground to not only explore scale, but also assert his own conception of material agency. Unlike easel painting, which allows paint to flow downward, positioning the canvas vertically may preserve the distinct dips and splashes of paint that became essential to his artistic practice.
Pollock represents an inversion of my artistic approach. In my view, and contrary to Krauss’ interpretation, he works on a flat surface to preserve the integrity of his drip technique and to introduce scale into the composition. When working vertically, as with traditional easel painting, the drips would simply run. I propose that he intentionally avoids this outcome, preferring instead to stand over the canvas and allow its flatness to shape his agency and intentionality. To elucidate, the artwork Inner Circle, a unique state gelatin silver polyptych, exemplifies the foundation of this speculation.
To make the work, a Lomo[1] 35mm camera was deployed to document parklands in inner-city Melbourne.[2] Next, light-sensitive gelatin silver paper was pre-torn to size. Each panel was then individually fixed vertically to the wall with tape and maintained in this orientation throughout exposure and development. Radical darkroom techniques were then deployed to subvert the aesthetic legacy of the matrix. This was achieved by manually applying photochemicals to the vertical surface with crafting brushes, cultivating material agency through mark-making to manifest authorial intentionality in its creative outcome. Notably, areas where the paper was taped to the wall blocked light, resulting in undeveloped perpendicular strips, or tabs, sparsely distributed along the edges of the photographs.
Adapting art historian and critical theorist Gregory Minissale's analysis of abstract easel painting into photography, the vertical orientation of print production enables the photochemicals to move in drips and runs as “a physical enactment of the releasement of will and the acceptance that [they] will, to some extent, find [their] own way.”[3]
Finally, each panel of the polyptych was secured directly to the wall at the top and bottom corners with exposed nails. The artwork was then pulled forward on the nails to sit two centimetres off the wall, causing the untethered edges to curl slightly outward in response to the tension of the prints’ confinement. This structural gap activates the surrounding physical space, transforming the artwork from a flat optical record into a spatial construction.
Summary
In contrast to asserting the photograph is an interlocution, the present study posits that the photograph is a considered, deliberately constructed material artefact, with the author-artist defined as the constructor whose primary objective is to “create an independent and concrete object,” rather than a “composition” and its discursive “formal possibilities” (fig. XXXX).[4] The exhibition space functions as a site for the “substitution and exchange” of works of art, further investigating sculptural installation as a spatial strategy and incorporating the principles of faktura into project design, production, and the realisation of its creative outputs (fig. XXXX).[5]
Endnotes
Lomography, better known as ‘Lomo’, is a mode of film photography best known for its technically inferior cameras that produce soft-focus lens distortions (including vignetting) and poor composition. See Kerry Maxwell, “What Is Lomography,” (Macmillan Dictionary 2013), https://www.macmillandictionary.com/buzzword/entries/lomography.html
Inner Circle, as with most of my studio-based research, draws on images from my ongoing film photography series, “Bike Paths of Melbourne” as the foundation of my artistic outputs. Initiated during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown and developed through daily cycling commutes, “Bike Paths of Melbourne” documents waterways, parklands, and urban environments along the bike paths of both inner-city and suburban Melbourne.
Gregory Minissale, “Disguised bodies,” in Rhythm in Art, Psychology and New Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 209.
El Lissitzky, quoted in Éva Forgács, “Definitive Space: The Many Utopias of El Lissitzky’s Proun Room,” in Situating El Lissitzky, ed. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Getty Research Institute, 2003), 56–57.
El Lissitzky, quoted in Perloff, “The Puzzle,” 15.