Tag Archives: Richard Jackson

Jackson Pollock’s physics

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Take a mathematician (L. Mahadevan), a physicist (Andrzej Herczynski), and an art historian (Claude Cernuschi) and you’re liable to get a different perspective on Jackson Pollock*, a major figure in abstract expressionism, art. (I’m pretty sure there’s a joke in there of the: “There was mathematician and a physicist in a bar when an art historian came in …” ilk. I just can’t come up with it. If you can, please do leave it in the comments.)

Let’s start with a picture (image downloaded from the Wikipedia essay about Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948),

No. 5, 1948 (Jackson Pollock, downloaded from Wikipedia essay about No. 5, 1948)

In a recent paper published in Physics Today (Painting with drops, jets, and sheets, which is behind a paywall), Mahadevan, Herczynski, and Cernuschi speculate about Pollock’s intuitive understanding of physics, in this case, fluid dynamics. From the June 28, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

A quantitative analysis of Pollock’s streams, drips, and coils, by Harvard mathematician L. Mahadevan and collaborators at Boston College, reveals, however, that the artist had to be slow—he had to be deliberate—to exploit fluid dynamics in the way that he did.

The finding, published in Physics Today, represents a rare collision between mathematics, physics, and art history, providing new insight into the artist’s method and techniques—as well as his appreciation for the beauty of natural phenomena.

…

“My own interest,” says Mahadevan, “is in the tension between the medium—the dynamics of the fluid, and the way it is applied (written, brushed, poured…)—and the message. While the latter will eventually transcend the former, the medium can be sometimes limiting and sometimes liberating.”

Pollock’s signature style involved laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it in continuous, curving streams. Rather than pouring straight from the can, he applied paint from a stick or a trowel, waving his hand back and forth above the canvas and adjusting the height and angle of the trowel to make the stream of paint wider or thinner.

Simultaneously restricted and inspired by the laws of nature, Pollock took on the role of experimentalist, ceding a certain amount of control to physics in order to create new aesthetic effects.

…

The artist, of course, must have discovered the effects he could create through experimentation with various motions and types of paint, and perhaps some intuition and luck. But that, says Mahadevan, is the essence of science: “We are all students of nature, and so was Pollock. Often, artists and artisans are far ahead, as they push boundaries in ways that are quite similar to, and yet different from, how scientists and engineers do the same.”

There’s more about this study on the physorg.com site including a video illustrating fluid dynamics. You can also find a June 29, 2011 news item on Science Daily and a June 29, 2011 article in Harvard Magazine about the study. From the Harvard news article,

MODERN ART WAS NEVER more famously lampooned than when Tom Stoppard [playwright and screenwriter] said, “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

The article by expanding on Mahadevan’s research gives the lie to Stoppard’s quote. (I wonder if Stoppard will write a play about physics and art in the light of this new thinking about Pollock’s work?)

This all brought to mind, Richard Jackson’s work which was featured in 2010 at the Rennie Collection in Vancouver (my most substantive comments about Jackson’s work are in my May 11, 2010 posting). Trained as both an artist and an engineer, he too works with paint and its vicosity. I still remember the piece in the gallery basement that featured three (as I recall) cans of paint apparently caught in the act of being poured. In retrospect, one of the things I liked best about the show is that a lot of Jackson’s work is very much about the physical act of painting and the physicality of the materials.

One final note, the L. in Mahadevan’s name stands for Lakshinarayan.

*’Pollock’s’ corrected to Pollock on April 27, 2017.

Vancouver Art Gallery show: The Modern Woman and Rennie Collection show: Richard Jackson resonate in unexpected ways

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Does the artist’s (visual, literary, musical, theatrical, etc.) personal life matter when you’re experiencing their art? It’s a question that arose in Lucas Nightingale’s response to Robin Laurence’s June 7, 2010 Georgia Straight visual arts review in his June 24, 2010 letter to the editor. The show in question was  the Vancouver Art Gallery’s big summer exhibition, The Modern Woman: Drawings by Dégas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and other Masterpieces from the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Laurence in her critique noted,

“I paint with my prick.” So claimed Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Asked what motivated his representations of plump, rosy-cheeked young women, he’s also reputed to have said his art was all about tits and ass. As for Edgar Degas—the perennial bachelor, anti-Semite, and misogynist—he said he wanted to view women in intimate settings, as if he were looking at them “through a keyhole”. That reads a lot like voyeurism, especially in light of his drawings and paintings of naked women drying themselves off after a bath, seemingly unaware of the viewer. Then there’s the aristocratic Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who hung out with and depicted women who worked in brothels, bars, and nightclubs. He died of syphilis and tuberculosis in 1901 at the age of 36. How and when the prostitutes died is not recorded here.

Nightingale’s comments included,

Despite Laurence’s article, I went to see for myself. I marvelled in front of Angrand’s Ma Mère. Did I see misogyny there? No.

I melted in front of Courbet’s Portrait of the Artist’s Young Sister Juliet, Asleep. Did I see treachery there? No.

Did I care that Degas was a misogynist or that Renoir was a pervert or that Toulouse-Lautrec hung out with prostitutes? No, because finding out about the skeletons in an artist’s closet is not why I go to the gallery—I go to be moved by what they create.

Laurence seems to set a standard that you must approve of an artist’s dirty secrets before you can appreciate their art; call me naive, but I probably wouldn’t know anyone if I set standards like that.

In general, I separate the art from the artist so I can appreciate the work but I also find that knowing a little bit about the background can inform what I’m experiencing. For example, The Lady from Shanghai, a movie directed by Orson Welles released in 1947 and starring then wife, Rita Hayworth is an amazing work. The scene in the hall of mirrors where the two lead characters shoot out their reflections with the shattered glass refracting ever growing numbers of fractured reflections is still studied and marveled over. You can enjoy the movie as a work of art without ever knowing that Orson and Rita were experiencing a breakdown of their marriage and working together on the film was an attempt to repair it. I do find that knowing some of the background story to the movie makes me appreciate the movie all the more even as I wonder at Welles’ insistence that his famous wife dye her legendary hair from red to a platinum blonde and casting her as a heartless vamp.

In a way I find the work that Renoir, Dégas, and Toulouse-Lautrec, etc. all the more amazing given their enormous shortcomings. It’s a paradox and, for me, how you resolve the issue of art/artist is highly personal. For a contrasting example, Leni Riefenstahl produced two film masterpieces when she worked for Hitler, a man who engineered the death of entire Jewish populations in Europe during World War II (1939-1945). I have seen clips of her work but am not sure I could ever sit through an entire film. To date, I have not been able to separate the artist from the art.

There is a good reason for learning about the background or the story of an art work. For conceptual art and a lot of other contemporary art you need the story to make sense of what you’re seeing. For example, the latest show (my previous posting here) at the Rennie Collection features (amongst other pieces) a rifle or two and a huge canvas which is a partial recreation of a Georges Seurat painting from the 19th century. Unless you know something about Seurat and his paintings, you’re likely to dismiss it as it doesn’t make much sense. Thankfully, the gallery insists visitors go on a tour and are accompanied by someone who can tell you something about the show and what the artist is doing. There’s a reason for the rifle. The artist (Richard Jackson) uses it to shoot paint pellets at the canvas and there’s a reason why he picked a Seurat painting rather than another 19th century artist’s work. See my previous posting for more about this but very simply, Seurat was a very precise painter who worked with tiny dots to create his images which contrasts with hurling a paint pellet using the propulsive power of a rifle at a copy of one of his paintings.

Jackson has also created a series of bronze ballerinas reminiscent of Dégas. The Rennie Collection has one on display for this show and I had the good luck to talk to a trainee guide about the piece. I’ve described the piece in more detail in my previous posting but briefly, the dancer has been knocked off her pedestal and lies crumpled below it. There’s paint dripping from the pedestal and elsewhere (including her head as I recall). The paint colour for the ballerina in the Rennie Collection is red, other ballerinas in the series have different colours for the dripping paint. The guide had found out from the artist who visited Vancouver for several weeks before the show was opened, that this series is intended as a commentary on how artists use women in their work and a commentary on how women in the arts were treated in the 19th century. Serendipitously or not, the piece provides an interesting contrast to the big show currently on display at the Vancouver Art Gallery which you can only appreciate if you know the story.

I think there’s something to be said for being able to go and experience a piece of art without having a degree in art history or knowing the backstory. There’s also something to be said for having one or both. As for being able to separate the artist from his/her personal behaviour, that’s up to the individual. Like I said, sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. I imagine many folks are the same.

Rennie Collection’s latest: Richard Jackson, Georges Seurat & Jackson Pollock, guns, the act of painting, and women

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My big reason (aside from my usual interest in/amused fascination by contemporary art) for catching the Richard Jackson show at 51 E. Pender St., Vancouver, Canada where you can find the Rennie Collection (can I call it a museum? a  gallery?) is that Jackson was an engineer. Or so I understood. I was intrigued by the idea of an engineer becoming a successful artist but after seeing the show I looked him up and found that according to his Wikipedia entry, he studied art and engineering.

He studied Art and Engineering at Sacramento State College from 1959–1961 and taught Sculpture and New Forms at UCLA Los Angeles 1989 – 1994.

So it seems that Jackson never worked as an engineer and I was a little saddened to lose that because it’s the kind of detail that makes the art even more interesting to me. Not being a visual artist or trained in art history, I primarily view art shows and the artists as collections of stories/narratives.

The Rennie Collection itself showcases only artists whose work is collected by Bob Rennie, a local and highly successful Vancouver realtor/developer/marketer. He’s no slouch in the art world, from an April 23, 2010 article by Maggie Langrick in The Vancouver Sun,

Vancouver’s ‘Condo King’ Rennie is a figure of international significance in the art world, a fact reflected in his recent appointment to the chair of the North American acquisitions committee at Britain’s Tate Modern Museum. His art collection includes works by more than 170 artists, 40 of whom he collects in depth.

The Wing Sang building that houses the collection has its own story which you can read here.

Jackson’s show, which runs until late Sept.,  is quite focused on bodily and other fluids, on the art world, and the act of painting in comparison to the Hatoum show which was the opening show for the gallery/museum which seemed  fixated on one’s sense of place, the themes of alienation and rootlessness, and electricity. Jackson’s work is very physical and he does most of it where Hatoum conceptualizes a piece and often commissions craftspeople to realize her concept. I mention the differences because it’s interesting to consider how different artists respond to the same space. I have no grand conclusions about their respective responses other than to point out that Jackson has physically melded many of his works to the building’s structure, paint is on the walls or on the floor and in some places he’s laid his own floor of puzzle pieces over top of the building’s floor.  In contrast, Hatoum’s work referenced the space obliquely. In the main floor gallery, Hatoum had affixed a sign to a wall to tell visitors how to behave. There was also a glass swing set (the type you played on when you were a kid, except it wasn’t glass) which in some ways had the effect of bringing the outdoors inside. I had some other comments about Hatoum’s show here.

Enough with the comparisons. Jackson’s work contains both humour and violence in jarring juxtoposition. I most appreciated his paintings where he uses canvases as his brushes. He dumps a puddle of acrylic paint on the front of a canvas and then picks it up and places it paint first against a wall and smooshes it around.  Once the canvas makes contact with the wall, the artist loses some control of the process.  Schematics for this piece in the main floor gallery are on the wall opposite so you can see some of the mural was planned but what happens on execution is uncontrolled. When Jackson is finished smooshing, he affixes his brush/canvas to the wall face first so the viewer is presented with the back of the canvas arranged in a pattern over parts of his mural.

This business of control and uncontrol and using unconventional ‘paint brushes’ comes up in another piece, La Grande Jatte (after Georges Seurat), an unfinished piece.

Jackson, a hunter, fires paint pellets from rifles (which are in a corner nearby)  at a huge sketch broken up into a grid (series of targets) of Seurat’s piece. For anyone not familiar with Seurat, he’s a pointillist who worked by precisely placing dots/points of paint on canvas. (This essay about Seurat offers a more informed perspective.)

There’s some dark humour in an artist who’s (a) shooting his own canvas with (b) pellets that explode on impact so the paint is splattered while referencing an artist who was known for his precision. Given that engineers are obsessed with precision and Richard Jackson studied engineering, some questions (nothing substantive, just interesting) arise. The whole piece brought to mind Jackson Pollock, an abstract artist, who poured and dripped paint from cans onto his canavases. (More about Pollock on Wikipedia.)

The theme of control/precision in relationship to spontaneity/chaos provided an interesting dynamic but not the only one. There was also an element of violence. The guns represent overt violence but two other pieces which were sculptural figures of women suggested, to me, violence of one kind or another. One figure was a woman in the colour pink lying on her back with her hips raised, legs opened and a funnel sticking out of her anus. I have two associations with that, a colonic or torture. The other figure was a ballerina who was knocked off her pedestal or stage so she was lying head first on the floor, legs up in the air, one ballet shoe off. There was a pool of paint/on the pedestal/stage and at least one more pool of paint, this one in the vicinity of the figure’s head. It’s one of a series as is the upside down woman, each with different colours. The ballerina’s pools of paint are red.

Both tour guides (one was in training) maintained that the experience of seeing the female figures as part of a series would change that impression of violence especially since the other figures in the series bore different colours. I don’t think that anyone could ever read a figure that’s fallen to the floor and has a pool of fluid by its head as anything other than wounded and the object of some sort of violence, intended or accidental.

I do think that the presence of additional figures in different colours would lead the discussion away from notions of personal violence to more generalized notions of violence in the way that this paraphrase of a quote attributed to Stalin, “One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,”  does.

I found the show to be thought-provoking and that’s always to be appreciated. If you’re interested in other opinions about the show, there’s this excerpt from Robin Laurence‘s review at The Georgia Straight,

Jackson has been described as a neo-Dadaist, probably because of the bourgeoisie-baiting irreverence he brings to his projects. He’s also seen as someone who deconstructs painting, although he says he’s more interested in expanding its possibilities than in taking it apart. Still, he long ago assumed conceptualism’s stand against market-driven and craft-based approaches to the medium: he critiques the painting as a fetishized object while embracing the process of reinventing it. “I don’t like art,” he says, “I like the activity.”

Nonetheless, there is a lot of art on view, some of it temporary and all of it (as is true of every show produced in this venue) drawn from Rennie’s personal collection. Installed on the main floor is Rennie 101, a big wall work composed of semicircles of thick, vivid paint and stretched canvases. In executing this idea, Jackson loaded 20 small canvases with paint, then placed them face to the wall and rotated them, creating a series of concentric loops of colour. The canvases were then mounted, again face to the wall, in a corresponding grid formation. The entirety is a wonderful contradiction: geometric and organic, restrained and spectacular, it reflects not only the artist’s early studies in engineering but also his desire to invert and unsettle traditional forms and practices.

As you can tell, she knows a lot more about art than I do so it’s well worth your while to take a look at what she has to say. If you’re interested in the seeing the show, you can book here.

where you can find the Rennie Collection (can I call it a museum? a  gallery?)