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Fear of a Drip Planet: Jackson Pollock's Memic Legacy

Jackson Pollock’s legacy has both a formal and vernacular register; it is at once profound and glib. Pollock’s monumental, dripped and poured canvases are a pillar of high modernism and the stuff of sight gags in The Simpsons (1989 ). From an artist’s perspective, Pollock was the benchmark for a new generation. All who followed Pollock, Allan Kaprow asserted in 1958, were obliged to begin by asking ‘What do we do now?’ But, writing in a British fashion magazine a quarter of a century after Pollock’s death, journalist Steve Dixon saw a different, ignominious destiny; ‘Imagine if Pollock had lived . . . he’d be relegated to making punk T-shirts’. Pollock’s formal legacy is rooted in the contained territory of high cultural bodies and discourses. His official status rests on cumulative institutional, critical and art-historical endorsement. As early as 1957, a survey of museum directors identified Pollock as one of the few post-war American artists whose work would ‘endure’; he was ranked second only to Stuart Davis. By the mid-1960s, critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried had positioned Pollock at the heart of an authoritative historical narrative of high modernism. For Fried, Pollock’s poured skeins of paint were indicative of modernist painting’s ‘increasing preoccupation with problems intrinsic to painting itself’. In this high modernist reading, art’s territory was necessarily refined and narrowed. Modernist art, according to Fried, involved ‘the alienation of the artist from the general preoccupations of the culture in which he is embedded and the prizing loose of art itself from the concerns, aims and ideals of that culture’. This divorcing of art ‘from the concerns of the society in which it precariously flourishes’ gave art a moral character that contrasted sharply with everyday experience—a self-critical art that embodied ‘life lived as few are inclined to live it: in a state of continuous intellectual and moral alertness’. But Pollock could not be kept separate from wider society and its general preoccupations. His popular reputation developed in the print media, unconstrained by high cultural criteria. As early as 1949, Life magazine had published an illustrated feature on Pollock, asking whether he was America’s greatest living artist. In 1955, Time magazine had declared him ‘The Champ’; the ‘bush-bearded heavyweight champion of abstract expressionism’. By 1958, two years after his death, Pollock was, according to the New York Times, the ‘best-known American name in abstract art’. This popular profile was supported by photographs of Pollock at work in his studio as shot by Martha Holmes, Arnold Newman and Rudy Burckhardt. Hans Namuth’s photographs, in particular, as Francis O’Connor observed, ceased to be mere documentation of process and became a