life by radio (LOL)

It's a sign I've been in the car traveling to meetings TOO MUCH of late.

But did here an interesting little segment of the NPR morning news (12/7) on David Hockney.   You might want to check this out.   Perhaps a more specific "art application" of your interest in social media?

A

on becoming "known"

Yesterday on my drive home from Plymouth State I listened to a 1999 interview (Terry Gross with Dave Brubeck).  He'll be 90 this Monday.   In the interview he discussed a period of his long, collaborative career in which he used the phrase or something close to it:  "becoming known".   He traced the kick-off of "becoming known" to his appearance on the cover of Time Magazine.  

So in this sense, "becoming known" moves beyond being appreciated by a few people for the quality of your work.  "Becoming known" means widening the audience with all the implications that come with that.  

Then I suppose, once you "become known" that "becoming known" has become a dimension of your work.  

One wonders if the consequences this dimension are anticipated?   Certainly they can't be fully known.  

I'm sure this NPR interview is a podcast somewhere.  It was pretty good.

this week

what a week.....

we are part of a cooperative weekly delivery of fresh seafood from Portland, Maine.   grace picks it up on Friday afternoons at some guy's house in north sandwich.  so far it's been really great.

it seemed appropriate this week that we got fresh pollock

Allan

a few thoughts

I have arrived.

How does the emerging artist create with so much against him/her in a competitive/elitist art world? As a creator how do we employ artistic impact, where does it come from and can we create art with meaning? I would like to believe that most artists like myself (aside from making a dollar) would like to be known for their art as proponent of change of some sort. Too idealistic, and maybe too Utopian but at least I remain optimistic. 

Just some questions:  Is the concept of "the art world" a useful or healthy one to accept and aspire to?   Not sure what "employ artistic impact" means?   Does "art" have meaning?  Or do meanings arise in people's experiences "of art"?    I wonder.... one becomes known.   But not by "becoming known" as a goal.  

I suggest the abstract expressionist art of Jackson Pollock as an excellent example of a career evolving rhythmically in a post-war era and the emerging media driven society of the 1950s. 

Very curious that you should unpack how a "career evolves rhythmically"

He was a celebrity of his time, who at the time of his fame was strangely emotionally torn (and lacked confidence) about the meaning of his art.

What counts as "strangely emotionally torn" versus the many emotionally torn people I know?  What made his notable?   The business about "lacking confidence about the meaning of his art" is (I think) important.   How is this known or documented?   It can't be as easy as connecting that he was "strangely emotionally torn" to "lacking confidence about the meaning of his art".  It could be.   But how does one establish this?

 It is known that throughout his life he dealt with many emotional difficulties. He also disliked authority and not to mention had a terrible addiction to alcohol. 

A bit like being a teenager these days it seems.  Again, there must be something about become that commonness?  

His early works show a passionate artist in process working to harness a voice through several styles …like that of Picasso (in the 1940s) for example.

What is a visual artists "voice"?   And how does it engage with other voices?

It’s engaging I think that by Pollock taking charge and unknowingly developing a new style of painting

This is documented, right?  He consciously narrated this at the time (not in retrospect)?

 ...his interpretations may have also been a reflection and or a representation a shifting society at the time. 

That's an interesting thing for you to interpret and demonstrate.

Pollocks drip technique was an unconventional art form to many (critics) as it lacked any identification of skill whatsoever. Yet for many this is why it may have been considered modern art. Pollock almost forces the individual to think that all art has to have a foreground, background, perspective, a tree, or a dog. 

Are you saying that it set out deliberately to defy any possible notion of "representation"?   That's interesting.   What's even more interesting is if this goal is humanly possible in the viewers experience?   Or does it take a certain kind of viewer who belongs to "an art world".

I believe that Pollock’s art unravels all of the comfortable notions which help those with artistic authority determine whether art is bad or good. 

This may be true.  Although I don't think it could possibly unravel "all" those notions.   Who exactly are those with "artistic authority"?   Used to be critics in certain highly visible forums?   But no one reads or pays attention to them today?   Associations of gallery owners?   Are all critics bad?   What distinguishes good ones from bad ones?  Does one have to be "uncomfortable" to be a discerning critic?

It is here where one might think a shift is taking place (K. Varnedoe, MoMA,1999) “The cigarette hanging from his lips, crossed leg, crossed arms, staring you down, tough guy, the sense of a kind of blue collar, macho tough guy as an abstract artist changed the whole definition of what the avant garde was in the United States. I think Pollock created an art into which a lot of people projected a lot of anxieties of the post-war era. They felt that this war was savage, violent, apocalyptic in a way that they felt was attuned to the age of the atom bomb, the age of an intense interest in Freudian matters, and psychological matters. At the same time, his confidence, his macho, his very celebrity and success fed the notion of America's emerging from the war as a leader on the global cultural stage.”

I agree that a dissertation might undertake to show these things.   Develop critical perspectives on the items above in order to find when and where they are accurate characterizations/interpretations of a life and career and it's "output" (which lives on).

Personally I wish I had an answer on how to find this “voice”

Isn't that your inquiry?   Which, I think, needs to be defined in a way that makes it a possible quest.   

 ...one that creates change and or a shift at least in my world of art. 

Nice....but the dissertation has to aspire to more than that even if modestly.  What I mean is that what you wrote above isn't mutually exclusive with creating and understanding or insight about how a person's art, life lived, celebrity (encouraged or imposed?) function or functioned in a particular time and place.   If that insight/understanding is developed in the right way, it can inform other times and places, lived lives etc.   But usually the point-of-departure is not "my world of art" although it is a completely essential dimension of the journey/quest.

Fortunately Pollock had the support of a major Life Magazine 4 page spread/article exposing his arts supposed impact. 

I think you used "supposed" very deliberately here.   And that starts to develop the notion from above:   How does a person's "voice" cut through the various myth-making mechanisms of our culture?   And what are they?  It's more than cutting through the "art work authorities".  It's also cutting through new layers of cultural phenomena...."media" over my lifetime has changed, evolved and shifted.   How people (who they are?  what they access?  and where?  and when?) combined with how they lives their lives in different places has changed.   So the cultural calculus about one person's career intersecting with an evolving culture is enormous.  By-the-by:  What was and is Jackson Polliock's status overseas in Europe.  That's always an interesting bench-mark to grasp that puts what you think was happening here in a comparative light.   You have to accept that it is very hard for us to see ourselves in our own culture.  Until you grapple with that a bit and let it change how you see yourself and what we "swim in" you are, I think, in a risky position.  It's not that we evaluate what we do here against those appreciations and authorities or whatever over there.  It's not that.   

Was he simply in the right place or right time? 

LOL:  That would be too too easy.

I suppose media had much to do with Pollock’s success at the time...as it still does. I spent twenty five dollars for a ticket to see his work not to mention his paintings are now worth millions. 

Yes.   Surely these are dimensions of the culture we live in that inform and define success.   But I think you yourself are ambivalent about what "counts as success".   Is being understood (however variously) success?   Appreciated?   Honored?  Supported?   Or, is the marks of success just the opposite of these things?   

"And this helps explain why 50 years after the fact, it's still hard for many people to see what's original in Pollock. They continue to see him as Jack the Dripper, American art's first media celebrity, a bald James Dean in black denim, a glorified doodler. It's remarkable that at the end of the 20th century, pure abstract painting, which he brought to a peak, remains the most difficult art for many people to grasp because content is still commonly mistaken for subject matter, as if a picture with no recognizable images in it can't be about anything."

Yes.  But this is the type of justification that supported "pure music" in the 20th Century?   The parallels (USA and Europe) are striking.  So when does the critic become a comfortable authority?  And when is the critic actually elaborating and extending the cutting edge of someone's work?   I suggest....the parallel to Picasso is worthy of investigating.   He was a figure who has celebrity status for sure.  And his work did pretty consistently defy many received conventions.   But, his work also (don't care to speculate WHY here) entered (I think) the popular culture of the entire world and affected how people see things, themselves, etc.   Could the same be said of Jackson Pollock?   So I'm wondering when a critic or ourselves for that matter judge a person to be relevant and addressing the "world" (or some part of it) or "the world of art".  Personally, I think having a relationship "to the world of art" is the sure death of the imagination unless one is prepared to either take it someplace else it's never been....or to deconstruct it into something new.

"Nothing in art since then, not Pop or Minimalism or anything else, is as radical and audacious. It doesn't matter that other artists dripped paint before Pollock; they didn't make of it what he did. To play C-E-G on a piano is not to compose a Mozart sonata. Pollock's paintings remain the central story of modern art in the second half of the century, above all because they gave permission to all other artists to break the rules."

Yes again.  So what's the baseline in this critical appraisal?   It's easy to write words like "radical and audacious".  Where is their "substance" in a commonly accessible worlds of experience?   

(M.Kimmelman, NY Times, 1998)

Through this Jackson Pollack journey I felt inspired to write, arrange and record a song called “I have arrived”...which was inspired by a poem called Pollock 51. Lyrically I believe this piece captures much of the emotional torment Pollock went through …not just with the tumultuous relationship he had with Lee Krasner (his wife) but the struggle he had with “arriving” at this identifiable movement in his work. These two recordings are from an impromptu session with my band The Cabin Kings. On recording number two our vocals were mic’d but the tambourine came in too loud. On recording number one we were un-mic’d...which resulted in a slightly more muddied version...but passable for listening. Although they are somewhat crude recordings....they to are evolving. I imagine this song will eventually make its way on our second album. I will email you the songs Allan. 

I'm still absorbing the lyric/song.....

Performed by: The Cabin Kings

Lyrics and Arrangement by: John Kane, 2010

Pollock 51 (I have arrived) 

Performed by: The Cabin Kings

Lyrics and Arrangement by: John Kane, 2010

I can’t love you Lee, I know you Love me

No accidents...no beginnings...no end.

From all 4 sides, all 4 sides

Looking down –at – my –control

Yes …I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived

Take another drink, take another peek

Please put it down, before it drowns your soul

From all 4 sides, All 4 sides

Broken glass, string and sand

Yes…I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived

I paint what I see, paint what I see.
Broken glass, string and sand

I can’t love you Lee, even though you Love me

This statement is a means to my technique

Yes…I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived, I have arrived

in the Raverty sort of direction

Here's a title I enjoyed and that you might find useful:

The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (2002).  Edited by Steven Johnson.  Routledge.  ISBN:  0415936942

Doesn't essay directly on Pollock but has 20 references to his name in the index.

I got it for the discussion on John Cage who was part of this scene.   The cover has a vintage picture of the Cedar Street Bar on it.

Another angle:

http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_gann07.html

I have some CD's of Morton Feldman's music.   I wonder if examining Pollock through a musical lens might be sustainable?  

Pollock/Raverty

I downloaded the Raverty article and read it.  Thanks.  I enjoyed.

The general approach he takes in this article is.....very much the type of work I think we would aspire to in the DA.  Such that:  when one has read the article, perhaps, your previous notion of what it takes to be a "leader" in the USA has shifted?  

It is curious and interesting to me that just about the full range of considerations in thie piece are ones that Ralph Waldo Emerson made in 1838, in part in "The American Scholar".   Then there is spillover in other essays where certain themes are elaborated.   I only mention should  Raverty's observations seem new or unusual.   It's all part of a long-standing approach, a definition of a certain kind of romance (mythological or otherwise) that is part of the American scene or the American Difference.  

I am more familiar with the musicians who hung out at the Cedar Bar.   But it was the mixing of artists and musicians and poets thats so interesting in the NYC scene at that time.   It, in effect, is a little bit of model for interdisciplinary work in the arts. I may have a book on this knocking around somewhere if you are interested.

What I think would be really good to do:  is to to take this entire essay and create a set of marginal notes (could be done with PDF annotations).  These should all be framed as critical questions (not answers or refutations) about the authors assertions, documentation, proofs etc.   They really need to be your genuinely skeptical takes since  the genius of a certain kind of writing is that it's convincing at one level.  But perhaps not under a fuller kind of scrutiny.   Put differently, Is the author just "making another myth" and certain readers will merely line up behind it believing.   That is not a doctoral dissertation (for better or worse).   Something a bit more is needed.

I think this would be a good exercise if this is the kind of work you want to do and this is the general topic as well.   After such an exercise, I think you'll come away with a better sense of your point-of-departure from such work.  One that leads into your own questions, developed contexts and eventually, insights.

Allan 

ives

A lineage of influence:     Ralph Waldo Emerson - Charles Ives - John Cage

My Jackson Pollock is Charles Ives.   Out there, revolutionary, misunderstood, cranky.

What is beautiful in music is too often confused

with letting our ears sit back in easy chairs.

Charles Ives