Close up here, move it along, get the right money ready, chop chop. Nobody resists the tin-pot herdsman of the revolving doors. New York aesthetes come docile to MOMA - or Momma as the acronym is pronounced hereabouts - because her most defiant son has made them legatees of vicarious bravado. Jackson Pollock rebelled for the century, for the American identity and, in all innocence, for the reinforcement of the capitalist value system.
We approach his works reverentially, as we might come to an altar, to stand before a physical manifestation of something we fear we cannot understand but which we believe, in our humility and optimism, might advantageously touch our immortal souls. We gather ghost-silent at the canvas with the $18-million price tag and open our hearts to the possibility of communion and conversion. I am a stranger to this culture. Abstract expressionism is a mystery to me. Words like scribble and dribble come to mind. The child in me wants to shout into these halls that the emperor has no clothes. I'm not ready for this.
Kurt Vonnegut science-fictionalised this one, about 20 years ago. He foresaw a time when art as we know it would be subsumed by a sort of state lottery system. Old Masters would be two a penny and a giant roulette wheel would be spun to ascertain the world's next most obscenely valuable painting. So some bloke did a picture of his cat, just for fun, won the lottery and everybody queued up around the block to gawp at it. It's a long shot, but I happen to know Vonnegut came to the Pollock exhibition not two weeks ago. He gave it a fair crack of the whip, too. Two-and- a-half hours, to be precise. And he came away feeling like shit. I have this on good authority. I also have his phone number. This is another part of town, a tall brownstone where Vonnegut lives and writes and paints funny pictures with enigmatic captions underneath them.
He is precisely as beautiful as I always knew he would be. Tall and diffident and mournful, with a face like God's and a laugh like a clogged drain trying to empty itself. He has nothing to hide. The Pollock show depressed him because the paintings were not pleasant for him to look at. He went to see them, he looked at them and they did not make him feel good about himself or about the human condition. He thought of how terrible Pollock's life had been; how little pleasure his success gave him while he was alive, how little pleasure his success gives Mr Vonnegut now, and so on and so forth. This is his explanation: when he wrote - he uses the past tense - when he wrote, he went to great pains to make himself understood. To be sociable. Give a good time to a total stranger. Be a good blind date. People need to know what you're on about and they need to know where they stand.
When you come out of a coma - something he knows about - the first thing you do is look around for the horizon. To get your bearings, you understand. To place yourself. Pollock's paintings have no horizon, no focal point, nothing to recognise. No mercy. The brain wants to make sense of what it sees; it can't help it. It can't stop trying to work things out, find something pleasant to play with, but Pollock offers nothing to focus on, there's nothing to recognise but novelty.
Not, he says, that there's anything intrinsically wrong with abstract expressionism. Vonnegut knows two adherents, both of whom, unlike Pollock, could draw. They explained it to him: you put the paint on the brush and the brush on the canvas and after that the canvas has to do the work. The canvas says, hey, what about a little red down here, and you do that and look at it and the canvas makes another suggestion, and so it goes. And maybe you make some pleasant, suggestive shapes for the mind to play with.
Even artists have to make a living. If abstract expressionism is where it's at, where the action is, that's what you must do to survive. God help us. God help Jackson Pollock if he'd ever wanted to stop the dribbling when universities and galleries and museums and collectors and so forth were saying it was important and shelling out the big bucks. He must have thought the world was as crazy as he thought it was in the first place. Who was kidding whom? Come on.
Look at me now, Kurt Vonnegut says, and rises from his chair. He acts out the following. Look at me, I'm playing with my paints. Like a child making mud pies. I'm making a mess, mucking about. I'm having great fun. Farting around, getting it all over the floor. It doesn't matter. I'm having a good time. I can throw it all away when the game's over. But this is the point - I'm a grown man and you should laugh at me. If you don't, you've got no sense of humour. Which is what's wrong. It's all become so bloody humourless, so earnest, so pretentious.
End of pantomime. The laughing drain rattles through the plug-hole and Vonnegut resumes his seat and his mask of tragedy.
Art, he says darkly. Art. Perhaps we should think up another word for it. Were Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock in the same trade? Did Jackson Pollock follow from Picasso or Van Gogh or Cézanne, painters whose work palpably pressed up against the edges of their talent? There was art and now what is there? It seems, he says, that after two world wars and the holocaust, we know everything's so terrible, all we can do is go blahblahblahblah or shut the fuck up. Art, literature, conversation, what's it all about, eh? Then this man comes along, who couldn't even draw, who had no talent, went blahblahblahblahblah and drove into a tree. And we respond as though he's just invented penicillin. We should have laughed. He was only fooling around.
Hey, says Vonnegut. What'd be really funny. You put your name on top of your A4 or whatever you write on, trickle coloured inks all over a couple of pages, mess around with it, then type "ends" on the bottom. That'd tell 'em all they need to know about Jackson Pollock.
What he says next seemed to be a bit of a non-sequitur. "I am 76 years old. My father never understood jazz." But it was only his way of saying he might be missing something in Pollock. Typical Vonnegut. Takes you on a roller-coaster and then says Perhaps Not.
Had he lived, Jackson Pollock would have been 87 years old on January 28. By way of a birthday celebration, several hundred Pollock aficionados joined executive personnel of the United States Postal Service for a party at the old Pollock homestead in The Springs, East Hampton.
This unlikely social coupling was occasioned by the imminent issue of a series of new postage stamps designed to portray various triumphs of the 20th century. To honour the Forties, in particular, they have selected the arrival upon the art scene of abstract expressionism. As the high-spot of the festivities, an enormous blow-up of the 33 cent stamp was to be unveiled and applauded. And so it was. The design is splendid, based on Martha Holmes' famous photograph of Jackson Pollock at work, squatting on his haunches with a can of paint in one hand, a dribbling stick in the other, and a fag in the corner of his mouth. Very nice. Except for one small detail. Someone - some whole committee, perhaps - has had the fag removed. Nobody smokes in America any more. Not even heroes.
Pollock might have been the archetypal all-American boy - born in Buffalo Bill's stamping ground and raised by poor farming folk in the wide open spaces of Arizona. Nothing east-coast sophisticated or west-coast mystic, about him, nothing effete or alien, he sprang untainted from the pure American soil. If you look into the face he reluctantly presented to photographers in his glory years, you can perceive something of the child he might have been.
Premature baldness helps, and the perpetually furrowed fretfulness etched into his skin. The inconsolable baby is in there, the barely hidden panic of the runt of the litter scrabbling for self-empowerment. Jackson was the youngest of five boys, their father was physically, if not emotionally, absent for much of their childhood. Four strapping, capable, functioning lads, therefore, were in loco patris to the mewling infant in the well-worn family crib. Two of them displayed early symptoms of innate artistic talent. As yardsticks, they must have been as daunting as they were inspirational.
It is not known whether it was a brother or some other bigger boy who chopped off the tip of Jackson's right index finger when he was four years old. At all events, the episode was written off as an accident with an axe. Jackson Pollock, the fact remains, was bereft of a drawing finger. If you look at his early attempts to overcome his disability - lumpen replications of photographs - you can easily detect that fine art was never to be his forte. What was apparent, however, was the bloody-mindedness that reputedly separates the great from the merely good.
By the time he reached puberty, he had imbibed the minutiae of art-student culture from his brothers and assumed that his future held something similar. He was never, by all accounts, much of a scholar, which lack of intellectual aptitude was further compounded at the age of 15 when he took his first alcoholic drink. Addiction was immediate. Nobody becomes an alcoholic. It's something you're born with, a chemical misfortune besetting very few habitual boozers.
The teenaged Pollock got drunk as often as he could afford it and, while drunk, developed the habit of ranting and thumping people that was to dog him for the rest of his life. It's rotten luck, alcoholism. But the Pollock brothers gathered around, protected their emotionally fragile charge, directed him shrink-wards. When the war came, they saw to it that a chitty from a psychiatrist would exempt him from call-up. Instead, he enrolled with his brother Sandford in Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration - a federal programme originally designed to keep people, including artists, in occupation and pocket-money during the Depression.
A hundred dollars a month was the shell-out, with the proviso that no two members of the same family could avail themselves of the same largesse. Sandford foiled the plot by changing his name to McCoy, and wrote guiltily to his mother, "If they ever find out about our pack of lies, they'll throw us out." So the two of them managed by living together, then teamed up with Lee Krasner, another WPA beneficiary who was later to become Jackson's wife. He survived. He painted, sculpted, carved, lived the artist's life.
The New York village landscape of the Forties isn't there any more. Looking for shadows of the struggling young Pollock is a fairly thankless task. The bar on Cedar Street where he tanked up has gone. Replacement watering-holes do not seem to entertain his ghost. I found one memory, though I cannot vouch for its veracity. A bohemian-style old guy, for the price of a Budweiser, said, sure he knew Jackson. He'd come roaring into the bar at Cedar and call them all bums. "There's me and there's Picasso," he'd bawl. "The rest of you are whores " He was always looking for someone to come for a ride in his car, he added for good measure. In retrospect, of course, I can see that the old man couldn't have been more eloquent. Picasso would be on Pollock's mind. Hell, Picasso was on everybody's mind. The great, unquenchable megalith had the art world by the balls.
We have no reason to suppose that artists are less competitive than stockbrokers or grocers. It's just that the poor, driven loner has to think something up all by himself to compete with the camera - if we think of the Thirties and Forties - and all the other poor, driven loners desperately trying to invent another way of looking at the world. We think art grows decorously out of artists, and artists from each other. In fact, they eat each other alive. They watch and plagiarise and chance their arms, eternally seeking a new perspective. Impressionism, surrealism, dadaism, cubism, all the isms were simply new ways of looking at things. And Picasso dominated them all. Painters lived in fear that he'd amble into their studios, see what they were trying for, and take it away and do it better. Which is what he did. He couldn't help it. A genius is entirely corrupt and utterly eclectic, like some monstrous vacuum cleaner sucking up everything in its path and transforming it.
When Picasso came up with Guernica, it must have felt like the end of the world. All Pollock could do was produce a chaotic jumble of what looks like noise, exactly the same size as Guernica, with a clumsy impression of a Guernica battle horse peeping through the paint. He was not a happy man. Picasso was unassailable, all mortal efforts to play in the same ball park were doomed to shameful failure. To Pollock, it must have felt like having four God-like brothers and a very sore finger. All he had going for him was a rage to get out from under; a wordless determination to have paint express himself.
Figurative, representational art became somehow obsolete. Abstractions had to be purely abstract but, with a brush in your hand and a canvas on the go, representations creep in - little self-conscious drawings that deny the purity of what you might have been expressing in the first place. Pollock was looking for a formless way of expressing form, or a formal way of expressing formlessness. He came close in 1934 when he painted fire. Flames have no centre, no beginning or end, no edge, no focal point, no time limit and no intention of being captured. Fire, like a painting, is merely what it is. Pollock's instinct was to allow elemental expression rather than to consciously pursue it. It was as though he felt that the paint and the canvas had as much right to their say as he did. With a brush in his hand making contact with the canvas, he would be interfering with the nature of art or the art of nature. And in a moment of quite mind-boggling selflessness, he took his brush off the canvas, gave the flowing paint its head. In this way, he was both in and out of the picture.
At the same time, and rather more prosaically, he was fighting for his sanity and respite from the emotional ravages of the demon drink. He went to a psychiatrist. Freudian fatalism had been a great boon to the surrealists and their dream-culture, but it had gone out of style in the Forties. Jungian principles were much more laissez-faire and optimistic. Pollock took his presenting problem - alcoholism - to one Jungian analyst after another, presumably unaware that any Jungian knew that it was the one affliction too powerful to countermand. At all events, Pollock treated his shrinks like art critics. Never one to chatter on, he'd trot along with a canvas and listen while they talked about the collective unconscious and totems and symbols and mandalas and the infinite interconnectedness of everything. And how life is what you make it. From time to time, he'd go on the wagon, but rarely for more than a month at a stretch.
In the winter of 1945, Pollock and his wife removed themselves from the stresses of city life and the ubiquity of alcoholic refreshment, and moved to the small artists' colony known as The Springs in East Hampton, Long Island. It must have been bloody cold when they got there.
East Hampton has resisted the influx of the last 53 years. The bar where Pollock drank has become an emporium for fake-antique sanitaryware, but the main drag is otherwise the same monument to suburban respectability and cutesie Saturday-Evening-Post-cover Americana as it always was. The bus drops you off in a blizzard by a quaint bastard-Tudor-style inn which is closed for refurbishment. The landscape falling away from the smug town has the bleak beauty of an old black and white photograph. This is how it was, this is what it must have looked like then. This was how cold the wind blew on Pollock that November.
The house where he lived is a sort of shrine now, a formally designated National Historic Landmark. You have to remove your shoes when you go into his studio, lest you scuff the stains left by the sacred paint on the blessed floor. Out back there is a bald patch in the clearing where he dismantled an old barn and moved it 20 yards to the left to give himself an unbroken view of Accabona Creek. As though in artistic appreciation of that decision, a pair of herons rise like ghosts from the misted reeds and fly north into swirling sleet.
Here is the front porch where he sat with friends on balmy evenings and sometimes laughed and once, famously, hawked an enormous gosley from his well-lubricated smoker's bronchus into the open roadster of a cruising art dealer. By all accounts, it was regarded as a popular political bullseye.
Bar the plumbing, the Pollock home is pretty well as it always was, pretty and unsubstantial and bang in the middle of nowhere. The living room is elegantly rudimentary, comfortable enough for the simple life on a limited income. A cheap pick-up turntable is broken, otherwise you could play the 78s stacked up against it. Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, Louis Armstrong Up A Lazy River, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington. The Pollocks on the walls aren't genuine, of course. Like the print peeling off its hardboard at the local grocer's shop, they are mere tokens of what was once real. The real thing once paid for a few groceries and the grocer, nobody's fool, told everybody it was an aerial view of Siberia before retiring handsomely on its proceeds. He thought he was joking. In point of fact, the tradesman had put his finger on the new perspective, the great breakaway revolution, the point of departure from all the other ways we had of looking at the world. The camera in the aeroplane. Till the second world war, only the Incas knew what things looked like from up there. Now, osmotically, everybody knew. But only Pollock used it. It suited his book.
On the kitchen table is an old Life magazine, a fine period piece, circa 1947. The cover girl has a chubby, cornfed face with a battered straw hat on top of it and a cardie thrown artlessly across her shoulders. The very image of post-war, emergent American girlhood, her name was Deborah Reynolds. When she grew up she changed it to Debbie. The important feature inside, bordered one side by an advertisement for a shaving cream that promises to wilt your beard and put you in the swim, is an unsigned article entitled "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" It was the sort of question one had only to ask in large enough letters to remove any ambiguity from the answer. The committee-composed article concentrated largely on the eccentricities of Pollock's technique while hedging its bets on his effect upon the nation's consciousness. But it made Pollock a household name and initiated his most productive years. It did not, however, make him rich. The most he ever made was between ten and eleven thousand dollars a year.
His success fuelled much drunken boasting, but never made him a happy man. Like all alcoholics, he couldn't decide whether to live or die. He habitually drove drunk. The spectacle of him inside his old Ford tipped into a ditch and sleeping it off was fairly familiar to the neighbours. Every so often he made an ambivalent stab at improvement. Here is another period piece of documentation: a somewhat tawdry sheaf of injunctions, laboriously typed out on a rackety old manual by some shameless quack who sold a soybean infusion for two hundred bucks a shot. "No commercial drinks containing sugar, or vegetable poisons such as cola, no coffee or tea or alcohol " By way of good value for money, he has listed the names of all the vegetables he can think of. Leeks, cabbage, radishes, scallions, watercress, lettuce, cucumber, parsley and so on and so forth, pages and pages of permissible detoxifying goodnesses, all to be followed by the $200 soybean chaser. Apparently, Pollock was quite slavish about his diet. He obeyed everything but the bit about no alcohol. When it killed him he had $362 in the bank.
Not far from the bend in the road where Pollock and two companions hit the fatal tree is Green River graveyard. It is not green and there is no river, but the gigantic granite boulder - known locally as a "glacial erratic" on account of the erratic way such rocks are distributed around the area - is an interesting feature. The bronze plate that says "Jackson Pollock" has turned an unpleasant shade of turquoise, and pilgrims have found large pebbles to rest on top of the boulder to mark their own visit. Personally, I gave him a bit of a stick, as all the pebbles seemed to have been taken. They say he was fond of glacial erratics. They also say he'd have been under this one within a month of the car crash anyway. His liver was shot to buggery.
A year after Life magazine made him a celebrity, Pollock was obliged to grant an interview to a radio programme, a recording of which is now available on CD in the souvenir shop attached to his old studio. The interview is one of those embarrassing encounters where one man flogs a dead horse and the other does an imitation of a double-glazing salesman reading his salespitch off a card at the end of a very long and disappointing day. Pollock is clearly suffering with an attack of sobriety, his vocabulary perfunctory, his cadence exemplary of the dying fall and the whole punctuated by much throat-grinding and flinching silence. But it is his living voice, as close as you'll come to his flesh.
"Mr Pollock, in your opinion what is the meaning of modern art?" the interviewer requests, ever hopeful. Pollock does his best. We live in the age of the aeroplane, the atom bomb and the radio, he observes cooperatively. The modern artist expresses the aims of the age he lives in. Each age finds its own technique. Each age expresses an inner world. "I like some flowers, other flowers I [grind-grind] don't like." On the fifth playing, you can hear that this is not as enigmatic as it was on first hearing.
You shouldn't look for something in modern art, you should look passively; try to receive what the painting has to offer. He doesn't actually use the phrase "eye of the beholder", but it's in there somewhere, waiting for someone to make the interpretation. Paul Jenkins is one of the western world's most successful exponents of abstract expressionism. He divides his time between New York, Nice and Paris. His enormous, pillared studio in downtown Manhattan is decorated by various objects of beauty, including a collection of giant canvases upon which rainbows have been exploded and teased into myriad stately statements, any one of which could take the skin off your eyeballs.
It is immediately evident that Mr Jenkins is not a man who relates carelessly to the world. You can read from his arrangement of kitchen implements and his personal courtliness that nothing entering his orbit remains unnoticed, unstudied, untidy or unloved. He has made scrupulous preparation on two sheets of quarto for this meeting. There are things that count, he explains, and things that don't count. Gossip doesn't count. When the two sheets are done with and personal reminiscence occurs, he points a finger at the tape recorder and waits for it to be turned off.
What is always abundantly and poignantly obvious, however, is that he knew, pitied, admired, understood and loved Jackson Pollock. He speaks very, very slowly. Even the gossip emerges in tones of doctorial deliberation. They met in 1952, when Jenkins was an art student and Pollock an established, if enigmatic, force. Pollock was in a belligerent frame of mind, exuding the psychic energy of the passive-aggressor recognisable to the student Jenkins as a symptom of alcoholism. He should have known. His father had been an alcoholic and, to this day, it is patently unbearable for Jenkins to recount the coincidence of the mere 44 years of both mens' life-spans. He withstood the whiff of bourbon, that confrontational glare, the dismissive comment. "Jackson liked people who stood up to him," he says.
Jackson, it is implicit, had little other choice.
These 47 years beyond that first personal contact, Jenkins keeps his head in his notes, as though they anchor him to his own sense of self-control. "Jackson revealed that the very structure of painting itself had to be changed if the other - the enigma, the inner self - was to be released. While first and foremost a painter, he described humanity without falling into the quagmire. He related ambiguity to mystery, not to illusion. When you look now at his work you can see how crafted it is, you can feel he is not incidental, he is not involved with accidents. He is objectifying his existence. He is involved with risk and chaos, not something merely hazardous for the sake of shock-value. He started with chaos and redeemed chaos with order. In the process, he suffered horribly Man-made nature takes time and pain. That Jackson was Icarus, that he should have got too close, that he burned is legendarily tragic."
Having delivered himself of this and other art-historical observations, Jenkins permits himself a glass of iced tea and gestures towards the tape. Look, he says, I want to use the word sincere.
Jackson was sincere. And sensitive to the point of clairvoyance. Of course, Jackson and Lee were involved in psychotherapies, he for depression and alcoholism, she for the emotional turmoil of being married to Jackson. Anyway, one day Jackson came home, took one look at Lee and was obviously stunned by what he saw. "What's happened?" he cried. "Something's happened to you. Something enormous." And she told him she had remembered a terrifying dream and had confronted her demons. "I'm sounding like some cockamamie shrink," Jenkins says, "but he could look at something and penetrate its reality. I don't know if it was this kind of knowing that caused him to want to numb the awareness, numb the existential pain."
Hence the vulgarity. But he doesn't want to talk about that. Not to the delicate English journalist. Then what the hell, she's a woman of the world. It was perhaps Pollock's respite, the womanising, the dirty talk. The rational explanation would be that he was afraid of women, but he certainly repelled them. Shocking stuff. Shocking! Where he wanted to put his penis, that sort of thing. Oh gossip, it doesn't count.
It became apparent in the last few years of his life that Pollock was profoundly depressed. Jenkins remembers that he bought himself a bow and arrows and a target and spent hours in his backyard scoring bullseyes. He stopped painting. On a visit to The Springs one time, Jenkins gave him a copy of Zen And The Art Of Archery, suitably inscribed. He didn't expect him to read it. To the best of anybody's knowledge, Pollock didn't read anything. But he liked the gift.
As a sort of quid pro quo, he insisted on driving Jenkins out to Mohauk to show him something to his advantage. Jenkins has never forgotten what he saw there. The Atlantic Ocean and rocks under the midday sun. Pollock was most insistent on that time of arrival. "The sun smashed the rocks," Jenkins says, "like a hammer."
Jenkins tried to persuade Pollock to go with him to Paris. To rest, regenerate, help face the rest of his life. He never knew how close Pollock came to concurring. Never knew he actually went out and got himself his first passport. But he didn't use it. Instead he went a-womanising and, this is Jenkins' insistence, committed suicide. "Too wretched," he says. "Too wretched to die alone."
Other interpretations of Pollock's death lack Jenkins's emotional involvement and are obviously closer to the forensic banality of what happened. It was a hot summer evening. Pollock was drunk. He decided to take his mistress and her friend to a concert. They all piled in the old Ford, started out and began quarrelling. He was too drunk to drive, the girls insisted. They wanted to go home. Pollock did a U-turn and started back, clipped a sapling and turned the car over. He was killed outright. One of the girls died soon after. It was an accident. One of those things that Pollock, in his work, insisted never happened.
When David Sylvester, art historian and critic, saw his first Jackson Pollock, he hated it. The violence of it disgusted him. He could see no health in it. Years later he relented. "Where," he asked himself, "were my eyes?" I gave myself one week. I took myself and all my prejudices back to the biggest Pollock in the exhibition and tried very hard not to think. If the eye of the beholder sees nothing, I reckon, there's maybe something wrong with the beholder.
"Don't look for anything," Pollock said. "React." It wasn't much when it came. Just that feeling you get when you look up into a tree or stand by yourself under a night sky. I don't mean the pissy sensation of comparing yourself with the cosmos and the macro-micro nature of the universe where you wind up overwhelmed by your own insignificance in the scheme of things. I mean that towering feeling. The one that connects you to your own centre and to everything else that is. The one that, if only you let it, makes you feel safe as houses.
Jackson Pollock at the Tate Gallery, London, March 11-June 6, 1999, is supported by the Guardian and an Anonymous Foundation in association with American Airlines. Advanced booking is recommended for the exhibition through First Call: 0870 842 2233.
To order the Jackson Pollock Exhibition Catalogue at the special price of £45 with free UK delivery (rrp £50), freephone 0500 600102, or send
a cheque payable to the Guardian CultureShop, to 250 Western Avenue, London, W3 6EE.
