(piano playing) Voiceover: So, what
are we looking at here? Voiceover: This is a Jackson Pollock in the Museum of Modern
Art, Number 1A, 1948. It's one of his signature drip paintings. Voiceover: It's called
1A? Is it his first? It seems like it is,
based on how it was named. Voiceover: Pollock was a little bit
tricky with his naming conventions, especially when he moved to numbering. He's not all that consistent. He didn't necessarily start
with 1, and then move up to 2. Voiceover: (chuckling) I see. Voiceover: When he
didn't want to confuse it with another painting
that was called, "1." Voiceover: (chuckling) I see. We do
that ourselves with Khan Academy videos. (laughs) We change the naming. When you look at this, and
I've actually seen some of ... I don't know if I saw this exact piece. They sometimes blend
together a little bit. But, I've seen some of his
paintings in real life. When you look at it from afar, they
do look like [a mess], a craziness, but up close, there
does seem to be some ... I couldn't just paint this
exactly the way he did it. It seems like there is
some technicality to it. It does [unintelligible], I guess,
a more general question of ... Does this look like a random mess? He just looks like he's
throwing up paint there. I think, for a lot of people, they
feel ... so what's the big deal here? I feel like a lot of people could
have done something like this. Voiceover: I think Pollock
actually would have liked the idea that we looked at it
and saw a bit of a mess. In fact, one of the issues
that he was interested in, and I think certainly the abstract
expressionists were interested in, is this idea that somehow the
internal self was being brought out. That might be, in fact, a mess. Voiceover: In a lot of our conversations, we've been talking about
the importance of context, not just looking at that piece
by itself, to get some context. This was done in 1948. Was there other stuff like
this that was done before, or was he really the first
to put up stuff like this? Voiceover: He was really the first. In fact, one of his compatriots,
another abstract expressionist said, "Jackson really broke the ice." This was the first painting, not
that was absolutely abstract, but that was, what we
call, "action painting," that was a kind of almost performative
action in the arena of the canvas. Pollock didn't paint on
an easel at this point. He took the un-stretched,
un-primed canvas ... That is literally just unrolled the
cotton duck on the floor of his studio, and then walked around it and painted. Voiceover: Yeah, and maybe
even threw the paint, or not necessarily even painting it. Voiceover: In fact, in this painting,
if you look at it really closely, there's a thin bead of white paint
that scrawls all over the surface. When you look at it really closely, you
actually see that it is a bead of paint that stands off from the surface. He actually boasted to one of his friends, that he had taken a large
tube of white paint. He had punctured the side of the tube. Then, in one movement, had
squeezed out the entire tube across the surface of that canvas. That is ... for him, it was
almost a kind of performative act. Voiceover: Just going back, we've
looked at a lot of modern art. One of the things that least
[unintelligible] me was when we discussed how modern art is not about creating
an illusion of something else that more traditional
art traditionally did. Modern art was really about the
piece itself representing itself, but before Pollock came along,
if I'm hearing you correctly, most of the people were doing
the more rigid modern art, or [unintelligible] [you call
them], I guess, careful modern art, where it was very geometric. It wasn't this. It wasn't
this wildness, or however. That's what you imagine
[unintelligible], this hairiness that comes to mind when you look at this. That's why it was of note. Once again, if i were to go
out, get an un-stretched canvas, I would probably have a lot
of fun doing what Pollock did, but it wouldn't be as
interesting to the art community. Voiceover: He was actually
really technically sophisticated within this technique. I think it's something
that's easy to get lost. He was a real master of
paint that was being dripped, that was being splattered,
that was being flung. He understood its viscosity. He was able to control it
to an extraordinary degree. You can see that in the
photographs of his painting, and especially in the
films of his painting. If you look at this
painting really closely, you'll notice that it's not
just paint that has been flung. Look at the upper-right corner. You might be able to just make out
that you're seeing his hand prints. He took black paint, and
stuck his hand in it, and then pressed it against the canvas. Now, there are some reports
that he had recently looked at paleolithic cave painting,
where there are hand prints, or more precisely, there are areas
where somebody put their hand against the wall, and then
literally spit pigment against it, creating a negative image of a hand. Pollock, I think, was
fascinated by trying to retrieve not the analytic, precise
geometry of abstraction that you talked about a moment ago, but rather going back to a primal,
elemental human experience. I think that he's able to
brilliantly collapse the 30,000 years that separated us and
the artists of the caves. Voiceover: I bring this up
a lot in our conversations. I see what you're saying. I also actually appreciate the fact
that he helped redefine what art was. That's one thing that I've
learned in our conversations, that it's not the art by itself. [It hasn't] pushed our thinking
as to what art actually is, but there's a nagging feeling in me that
it is overinterpreting it a little bit. You never explicitly said that he
had visited these cave paintings, then we would just say, "Well,
he put hand prints there, "because he felt like
putting hand prints." Is there something to that,
or am I not seeing it? Voiceover: I think that the
idea that we are interpreting is something that always
makes us uncomfortable. This isn't math and science. At least, this isn't arithmetic in
that there is a clear, right answer. This is actually something
that I wanted to ask you about. When you get in higher mathematics,
and certainly the sciences, am I wrong that there is
interpretation involved? Voiceover: I'm not sure
if it's exactly the same. What you do have is, especially if
you go to higher-order mathematics, or higher-order physics, you
will have equations emerging. Then, those are subject to interpretation in terms of what are they
telling us about reality? Here, it's a deeper form
of subjectivity, I guess, for lack of a better word. I don't think there's
anything wrong with that. Obviously, that's what art is ... is that we subjectively
have a reaction to it. I guess what I sometimes feel, and
I suspect a lot of people feel, is why was this thing validated? There's so much out there. It does seem a little
bit arbitrary sometimes. Do you, as an art historian,
feel that sometimes? Beth: I don't think we
feel that at all, actually, or at least I don't. I think because the question
that keeps coming up for us also in these conversations of context. In this case, with Pollock, it would mean America during the post-war period. It would also mean
looking at Pollock's life and the kinds of things
that he was interested in as an individual. We know that he was
interested in psychoanalysis. We know that he was
interested in delving inward. When we look at works, like "Number 1A," we can put it in that broader
context of both the individual and the culture that he lived in. Voiceover: It's true that all of this art, and, in fact, the styles
that are developed are very clear attempts to solve
problems that these artists are engaged in, in a very personal way, and also in a very philosophical way. I think there's a clue
that Pollock is giving us. If you look at the
title, "Number 1A," 1948, it is Pollock's very conscious
attempt, and very clear signal that he doesn't want to give a
narrative title to this painting. He wants to leave the
field open, in a sense, so that there is room for interpretation. He doesn't want to close it down. So, what he's done, is he's
borrowed a system of titling that comes from music,
that comes from composers. He's doing this in order, in fact,
not to prompt certain kinds of images, so that we're not looking
for something specific. Voiceover: How many of these ... because the other thing
that the title tells you is that it's probably not
the only one like this. How many of these did he end up doing? Voiceover: It was only
a few years before this that he really began to experiment
with the way in which paint could be applied to a canvas. This is a very radical idea, tak- Beth: Without a brush. Voiceover: Without a brush, that's right. Taking the canvas off the
wall, putting it on the floor, so that there is this
very direct confrontation between the artist's
movement around the canvas and the actual paint itself. In fact, some art historians
have gone so far as to say this is almost a kind of
choreographic notation that we literally see the
artist's hand movements and body movements here. It is their dance through
space that's being rendered. The artist begins to experiment
with these thick [schemes] of paint that intertwine. He does that in a tentative way,
still during the 2nd World War, I think, in 1943, 1944,
pulls away from it a bit, and then really dives in around 1947, and now we see in 1948. He'll continue this through the
large, triumphal paintings of 1950, and then he'll hit a wall. Now, part of that had to
do with his own biography, but he pushed painting probably
as far as he could have at that moment, and then he began
to explore, again, the figurative. We're looking at a painting
that is at this incredible and dynamic moment of
invention and exploration. Beth: I think that
there's always the danger of over-interpreting, but
that for the most part, in the museum, it's good
to be open to the idea that the images have meaning, and that for the most part,
what we're given are paintings that there's a consensus are important, and that somehow that reaction
that I think we all feel, that I know that I certainly
still feel when I look at some works of art in
galleries and museums of, "What is that? "What could that be? "Why is that important? "That doesn't look like
much of anything to me." ... and to take a step back and
try to learn something more, try to broaden my horizons. What the museum gives
us is the final object. Voiceover: Yeah. alone on the wall. Really, we need all of these other things to come to terms with the work
of art, and truly appreciate it. Voiceover: That brings up,
I guess, a broader idea. Obviously, there's a very famous
movie about Jackson Pollock. I remember, when seeing
that, seeing the actor go through the motions of reinacting
what Pollock might have done, that seemed like a form of art by itself. Some of what Steven has been
talking about is what's neat about this painting is you can
almost imagine the artist's motions as he went around the painting. It seems like there would
have been a legitimacy to even having documenting his movements, video-taping him, whatever,
pictures, whatever that might be, and even having that part of the piece, or at least context for the piece. Voiceover: What you're
saying is really interesting because there was a big
debate among critics of Jackson Pollock at this time, trying to understand
really where the art was. There were 2 very well-known
critics at this time, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Greenberg, Pollocks work
really didn't become art until he picked it up off the floor. Then, it joined in a sense, in its
verticality, the history of art. Harold Rosenberg took
another position and said, "You know what? When
you put it on the wall, "it's only a fossil. The
real art is contained "in the action itself in the risk,
in the energy, in the dance." Voiceover: [unintelligible]
intermediary stuff was maybe these should be viewed
not on the wall, but on the floor. Voiceover: Well, yeah. It's a great point. Sometimes when I'm in the
museum, I have to admit, I sometimes cock my head
at the side of the canvas and really try to reimagine
what it looked like to Pollock because he didn't see it
the way that we see it until he hung it on the
wall, until he stepped back. (piano playing)