Post (Contemporary Art)

24 February 2010

RESPONSE ARTICLE 2:

Allan Kaprow’s “The Legacy of ”

As one of the great early conceptualist modernist artists and painters, Jackson Pollock has been and continues to be an integral and important individual in terms of art history. His and drip painting techniques were extremely new ideas and captured the general audience, including his peers and fellow artists. Among those was conceptual artist

Allan Kaprow who read Jackson through a conceptual lens as opposed to a formalist outlook.

Kaprow believed Pollock opened the doors to what artwork can truly be, where art and life become almost blurred, and to where artists start to incorporate themselves and their viewers into their masterpieces. As Kaprow wrote, “Pollock’s choice of enormous sizes served many purposes, chief of which for our discussion is the fact that by making mural-scale paintings, they ceased to become paintings and became environments.” (Kaprow, p. 56)

Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, such as Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) of about 1950 really encompassed the sense of a performance in art. The process of making the art almost became as important as the art work itself in the end. “With Pollock, however, the so-called

“dance” of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing and whatever else went into a work placed an almost absolute value upon a kind of diaristic gesture.” (Kaprow, p. 53) He goes on to say that the artist, the viewer, and the outer world become interchangeably involved in the process and journey of a Pollock painting. In “Subject as Object”, artist creates a work that enables the viewer to become the work of art in his Device to Stand In of 1966. Like Pollock’s

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), Nauman’s work is like a performance piece in that the viewer is invited to insert a foot into an open wedged-shape object on the floor. “The nature of this form suggests that a spectator be held by, and in, the same place as the normally distanced object.”

(Subject as Object, p. 198)

Kaprow ultimately thought that Pollock’s drip, pour, and splatter paintings of his time were the culminating acts of advanced painting; it liberated it of all the formal, relational, and material constraints that had been the field of its being. Pollock’s works most definitely represented the idea of how subject became object, or how the artist or viewer becomes the work of art. Allan Kaprow read Jackson Pollock through a conceptual sense, and in that way deemed his efforts most important as his paintings became more like environments than pictures on a canvas.

Kaprow, Allan. "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." (1958). "Subject as Object." New Art in the 60s and 70s, Redefining Reality: 195-227.