Pollock and horizontality

Résumé du document

For Siqueiros, Mexican revolutionary mural painter, canvas and oils are the "outworn conventions of a dying bourgeois culture". Thus the topic of the work or the conventions in painting are less a symbol than the institutionalized way to paint a canvas on an easel. The painting by Pollock is a perfect representation of this revolution of "horizontal axis". To symbolically give up the bourgeois vertical axis of painting or the vertical way it will be hold up on the wall, the canvas is now displayed on the floor. The artist is above and he is the one staying vertical; implicitly, it is for me a gesture of the artists' domination over their work.

Extraits

[...] The painting by Pollock is a perfect representation of this revolution of “horizontal axis”. To symbolically give up the bourgeois vertical axis of painting or the vertical way it will be hold up on the wall, the canvas is now displayed on the floor. The artist is above and he is the one staying vertical : implicitly, it is for me a gesture of domination over their work. Indeed, this technical innovation by the artist is a way to prove that he is making the painting very personal, the representation of his own artistic will and not anymore the precise formal criteria of bourgeois art. [...]

[...] In these ones, he opposed the vertical axis of the body to the horizontal axis of the canvas to pee on it. Anyway, it is a really new vision of the artistic creation; it is like the vertical been lowered” to quote Rosalind Krauss. It allows the emergence of the formless or “anti-form” for Robert Morris. I come back here to my point about precise imagery of bourgeois art no longer present : it is impossible to figure out a real object or even a shape in the Pollock painting, or it will remain an interpretation. [...]

[...] This difference of axis is like the paradoxical meaning of the floor, practical axis of creation, and the wall, only support of observation. On the contrary, with the easel of bourgeois art, it was the artist declaring his submission to the spectator, by already painting the landscape or the portrait the way the spectator would watch it. Briefly though, that is why for me horizontality is revolutionary. The Pollock's is for me more than the particular sign of his originality but the symbol of a new generation of painters who are emerging. Indeed, Pollock is often qualified as the father of modernism. [...]

[...] Pollock does not let a clue, with a form, and even the title does not have any relation with the subject of his painting. It is a bit like the understanding of the painting had to be deserved, maybe in a certain way “formless” could then be seen as a snobbism. The horizontality then establishes a new distinction between the painter and the spectator, or more precisely try to build a hierarchy between them. The painter has his canvas on the floor under him, and he is really the master deciding everything. [...]