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Monday, September 15, 2003

My modern art teacher told me I made an original comment about modern art that no one else is saying. I think this is good. Here's what I told him.

Jackson Pollock's drip painting are a physical rendering of performance art. Pollock painted as if in a trance, like a performance, and it's captured in physical form in his drip painting.

If you took a movie, which is made up of frames, and laid the frame on top of each other you'd get a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Time is layered like the painting, one of top of the moment, moments are layered together to make one physical piece.

The concept of snapshop in time, what the impressionists were trying to achieve, doesn't exist in Pollock's work because his work is result of hundreds of snapshots in time, layered one on top of the other, to create one cohesive work of art.

In Pollock's drip paintings, you can also see the influences of cubism because in cubism you saw on one painting, faces, body parts from different angles, as if they were in different time periods. You get the same in Pollock's work because you can see how over time he layered the paint over and over again.

I think Pollock was also borrowing from Dada art, because of the performance aspect of his art, but also taking Dadaism and turning it on its head.

Dadaism is where performance art start, but really performance art for Dadaism was anti-art, a reaction against art, questioning what is art if it's not physical. Pollock took performance art and made it physical, made it art.

In studying how Jackson Pollock made his famous drip paintings, you can also see the birth of conceptual art, especially some of the pieces created by Yoko Ono, and the birth of performance art, in the work of Laurie Anderson and even Andrew Goldsworthy.

I can't believe no one else is making these connections, especially about Pollock's work being performance art, and him birthing conceptual and performance art, not as anti-art, but as an art form.

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