Portrait and a Dream (1953) by Jackson Pollock
"I don’t paint nature, I am nature" is only a few rungs up the art historical ladder from ‘It’s art because I say it is’ and only a few more rungs down from ‘Pollock Sucks!'. But what if we get away from of art-speak cliches? We are used to those over repetitive narratives of brave creativity leading to the isolating bubble of celebrity, crippling self doubt and full-blown self destruction.
But there are far more delicate contradictions that forever bounce round this black echo chamber of art history and bounce off ever diminishing barriers. On one hand we have this notion of Pollock providing something akin to Greenberg’s vision of a truly modern painting that has finally abandoned all literary, unnecessary content inherited from European modernism. On the other, we have this notion of visual art as primarily a record of a thing in time, becoming the factual membrane and documentation of a performance and movement. But this gives us a method to extract more difficult and demanding aspect of Pollock’s art, lying under this chaos of myth.
And so it appears that Portrait and a Dream, 1953, is a final self-reflexive musing on the opposing yet rotten center of Pollock’s later art. The left hand tangle has been likened to a woman during child birth, a nocturnal orgasm, and a mother decapitating children. The fat, bruised and mangled face on the right takes a long look back at failures. Like us, it can only see the hypnotic dancing tumble of lines as they untangle, erupt, and bleed their way across the image. They simultaneously belie some kind of ecstatic sensation of a dark nightmare mixed with ecstasy, but then it all dissipates back into the canvas, that unforgiving fabric of the canvas.
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