Thursday, November 10, 2005
Pollock
I was prepared to dislike Pollock, Ed Harris' 2000 movie about the great American painter Jackson Pollock. The opening scenes with Pollock, the depressive drunk, inhabiting the screen in the horizontal, didn't encourage me. But Harris showed great integrity in the movie; he made many imaginative leaps into the mindset of, and working methods used by Pollock.
Harris' gentle way of showing Pollock's path from abstract painter with brushes to his full body splatter technique was particularly noteworthy — it is a tough thing to show the development of a sensibility. There are few good movies about artists. This is one of them.
The influential art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg (along with Harold Rosenberg), at once arrogant and understanding, and the surrounding crew, principally his wife, the fine painter Lee Krasner, were conceived in a complex, adult way. Marcia Gay Harden received well-deserved applause for her performance.
Pollock's interior-dwelling retreat from imagery devolved in art that came later into an aesthetic of solipsistic sensibility, which in the current art world is the ying, to the default yang of ironic conceptualism. An artist can't be responsible for those who follow in their wake. There is also a loss of nuance in the embrace of main force energy in Pollock's later work. There's always a trade-off. Pollock provided a true American voice, a visual jazz of improvisation, of the good chance. There is no century or country he could have painted in but the US of A.
Pollock is by no means a great movie. Ed Harris put his own money into the movie and got together with his friends to make it. That has its good and bad sides. His decisions to both direct and star was probably a mistake. He isn't an interior actor — the scenes where he is supposed to be devastated or blasted have him just staring blankly — you can't see inside the character. The end was too long and overly elaborated. Many scenes felt fuzzy in their intentions. However, Harris' feeling for the material, the atmosphere, and fairly accurate representation of the life of an artist at a particular time in a seminal moment in American art was surprisingly well-crafted.
The movie needed fuller treatment — Pollock created a universe, which is what good artists do, and that is unreproducible by other means, only to be seen in the work itself — but the movie, blessedly, provided honorable intelligence in approaching Pollock's still controversial, wonderful, explosive and exciting art.
Critic Harold Rosenberg: “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.”