Drunken Crazy Action Painting
Jackson Pollock, Wild Cursive Script and what Modernism still owes Asia
I happen to find ways that are different from the unusual techniques of painting, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don’t think there is anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn’t unusual — the Orientals did that.
- Jackson Pollock
So much that’s been written and said about the modern masters of abstract expressionism might strike readers today as either quaint or overly grandiose or somehow both at once. For most of human history thinking about painting meant thinking about pigment on a surface. While that is still the case, painting today also encompasses such a wide range of techniques from physical to digital and combinatorial and AI generated and everything in between. It can be difficult now to imagine that splattering paint was revolutionary. Yet that is how Pollock’s experiments in black enamel paint were received and continue to be received, owing to a relatively conservative set of accepted ideas about what painting was supposed to be.
While I have always relished the opportunity to look at American Abstract Expressionist paintings in those grand white rooms with twenty-foot high ceilings in museums I am often uneasy about the credit that this group of mostly white men from New York gets for popularizing techniques and ideas that have been around in different forms for millennia. For all the joy and excitement that making and viewing American “action-painting” can provide, we should make more of an effort to see those developments in the light of global history, particularly in relation to Asian calligraphy and painting.
It is really no secret that Asian art influenced European and American artists in a lot of ways. In the 1950’s during the advent of Abstract Expressionism the American artists themselves were continuing a then-longstanding tradition of appropriating ideas from other cultures. The impressionists were admitted super-fans of Japanese art. Mary Cassatt, Degas, Whistler and others borrowed from Japanese prints in their compositions. Picasso famously adapted the angles and abstraction of African masks. But what is often left out of the conversation is that the mid-century abstract expressionists owe a great debt to Chinese calligraphy as well.
As a lover of Chinese language and culture let me attempt to spotlight a particular form of Calligraphy from China and consider it in relation to Kline and Pollock. 狂草 (Kuángcǎo) means “wild script” and it looks like it sounds. There are a lot of different types of calligraphy. But when I first encountered this style, I thought immediately about the American Abstract Expressionists. Here is a comparison of details from a famous autobiographical caligraphy by Huai-su (懷素) from about 800CE on top, and one of Jackson Pollock’s enamel paintings from 1948 on bottom:
There are some formal similarities of course: the wild, arcing lines, the variation of widths and intensity, the relatively monochromatic approach. Furthermore, Huai Su also loved drinking, so much so that he was deemed the “wild monk”. So we have a passionate drunk guy slinging ink around unselfconsciously in search of higher truth. That sounds a lot like Jackson Pollock to me!
Pollock, Franz Kline and others were simply employing a basic human instinct to work expressively with liquid media on 2-dimensional surface. Previous non-Western cultures such as the ancient-Chinese stumbled upon similar processes and achieved results that were similarly expressive and “wild” although naturally they existed within a different kind of cultural framework.
Personally, I think wildness in art —or should I say the acceptance and promotion of wildness — is a natural reaction to both wealth and refinement. Essentially, when societies become more refined there’s more appetite for craziness (of course this is an oversimplification and since I am too lazy to dig for references I’ll just say this is my own opinion! 😛). Both the Tang Dynasty and 1950s New York were influential cultural hubs. The Tang Dynasty was a golden age of Chinese art and culture, while 1950s New York was a hotbed of artistic innovation, including the Abstract Expressionist movement of which Pollock was a key figure. Here is some more information about Huai-su:
Huai-su was originally surnamed Qian (錢) with the style name Zang-zhen (藏真). Born around 737 in Ling-ling (零陵), Hunan (湖南), he later moved to Chang-sha (長沙). In his youth, he took the tonsure and became a Buddhist monk, adopting the name Huai-su. In his spare time from reading Buddhist scriptures, he devoted himself to the art of cursive script. In the local area, he acquired a name for himself in calligraphy, being praised by poets and scholars who flocked to present him with poems and songs. Around 768, he traveled west to the capital of Chang-an (長安), where he searched for ancient works of calligraphy and associated with members of the nobility and elite. At the capital, his consummate art of wild cursive script achieved even greater fame. In 772, he returned home and passed through Luo-yang (洛陽) on the way, having the opportunity to meet Yan Zhenqing (顏真卿, 709-785), an established calligraphy master. Yan Zhenqing wrote a preface for the admiration expressed by others, and Huai-su transcribed a portion of these poems and verses while also narrating the course of his study in calligraphy. The poetry describes the forms of Huai-su's cursive script, the wild manner as he did cursive script, and the speed of his brush. When compared to the features of this handscroll, one finds that the galloping and surging manner of the energy in the brush - while still within the rules governing calligraphic forms and procedures - is remarkably varied. Breathtakingly animated and unrestrained, Huai-su brought the fine art of cursive script calligraphy to its ultimate expression in this work.
http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/calligraphy-huai-su-autobiography.php
Not only are there formal similarities, but the goals of the artists — essentially to use one’s own experience to commune with the universe — were remarkably similar as well. Here’s Pollock:
“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, and easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”
There are two other aspects of Pollock’s work that I would like to attempt to discuss in relation to world history, and both are about materials.
First, the use of the atomizer — the straw-like tool that Pollock sometimes blew into to create paintings1 — only seems novel when viewed through the narrow lens of 20th century modernism. Recent research suggests that many cave paintings of hands were made by blowing pigment through a hollow reed or bone. This method produced outlines slightly larger than the real size of the hands 2. So this was not a modern innovation in painting. While it may have seemed strange in an American Academy, the idea of blowing paint through a straw is literally tens of thousands of years old!
Secondly and more importantly, I want to talk about Pollock’s use of latex and enamel paints. Pollock started using these kinds of paints just as they came into industrial production3. It’s important to realize that these paints had properties that enabled them to drip and cling in very specific ways. The commercial development of new painting materials themselves had as much to do with these innovations in painting as Pollock and other painters did. Personally, I think developments in painting technology essentially allowed Abstract Expressionism to happen. This is of course what artists have always done: take whatever new materials and ideas are at hand and apply them in novel ways. But the further we zoom out, the more we can see commonalities with other places, peoples and times.
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/652364826
All of this is not to “center” Pollock necessarily. Nor to minimize the efforts of many generations of individual poets and painters and calligraphers in Asia by comparing them to a handful of white men in New York in the 1950’s. Rather, maybe we can use those paintings to serve as an interesting entry-point for Western audiences interested in expressive mark-making. Of course, the Chinese language is notoriously difficult to learn and understand, particularly the characters. Still, we can admire the “galloping and surging” quality of Huai Su’s brushwork without recognizing the language. And on some level it must be even more difficult to use characters as a springboard while also embracing the abstract and spontaneous qualities of the lines. So let this be a simple reminder that Chinese artists and poets have been making inspired marks on paper for millennia. Pollock himself was aware of the connection. In this millennium, art institutions and and other artists would do well to recognize the influence as well.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/36965
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/children-worlds-first-artists-new-study-finds-quarter-prehistoric-spanish-hand-paintings-kids-13-2084734
https://web.archive.org/web/20170209114820/http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory/a/Pollock_paint.htm