Lesson 5 - Smithsonian - Pollock

He was the first American to capture the popular imagination. A "cowboy" from Wyoming, Jackson Pollock was always controversial and the pressures of his new-found celebrity compounded his life long struggle with alcoholism, a fight he lost when he died in a car crash at the age of 44.

"New needs need new techniques and modern artists have found new ways and new means of making a statement. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, and the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique." For Pollock that technique was abstract expressionism and he performed this through his famous drip paintings. He has earned both notoriety and abuse for his work and people have even gone as far to question whether or not it would be too hard to paint like that themselves so that they could be known as an artist as well. I find this interesting because like in the lecture video, it states that art is the finely tuned sense of craftsmanship that is celebrating a humans ability to render reality or fantasies. Anything can be art, Pollock proves that along with many others in the world. Yet what I find the most interesting is that it seems he is the only one, that I know of anyways, to be so publicly contradicted in the art world. He is ether the greatest painter in history or a kindergartner could perfect his paintings.

What I liked about this video is that they actually have Pollock narrating for part of it. I liked this because you are listening to the thoughts directly from the artist themselves rather than through the researched presentation of a narrator. You actually get the sense of what their emotion is when their talking and the actual facts. With a narrator there's always a posed question that they strive to answer through the video through their research, but only the artist can really answer that question. Granted it's hard when studying an artist like Michelangelo who's been dead for the last few centuries, but I think you get the point.

Who I found interesting was not just Pollock, but also the people interviewed that knew him personally. This adds a special affect to a biographical documentary because you're not just hearing from the Pollock himself, you're also hearing from the people who surround Pollock's life and knew him more than any other person. Rather than just listen to any other opinion from a critic about an artist, who listen to the opinion of someone who actually matters to the artist and without bias tell you how Pollock really was as a person.