Crush on Jackson's whim

Number 5, 1948 by Jackson Pollock

Here’s a piece of artwork that seems to be painted in less 10 minutes: as if a baby spilled his own bottle of milk on the board and rampaging over the board with his body painted with various colors. It’s quite similar to the graffiti the baby is making using all of his body. Check out the video.

What I felt when encountering this so-called “masterpiece” was not a wrath toward the museum which exhibited this piece. I was rather dumbfounded and soon got mesmerized. I fell in love with this work at the first sight: obviously not because of the aesthetics of it but because of the way I interpreted this piece.

Before making more misunderstanding about me (such as a guy with bizarre taste) I’ll share my thoughts about my definition of art and people who are receiving it.

I’m somewhat proud to say that I am entrenched in the field of architecture. I thought, at least for architecture, that art or design has and needs the power to please the viewers so that the creator of the artwork can make the viewers easily acknowledge what he or she meant from the work.

For example, when I show you this architecture, I might predict quite precisely what emotion is aroused by the viewers: maybe democracy, stability, equality. This is because it's based on a. This is a trick. This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. It's a predictable emotional connection, and the architects have been using this trick since at least the start of 20^th century.

In the same context for the field of painting, the painters, I believed, had some kind of technique or nuggets that trigger certain emotion from the viewers that can make the viewers feel satisfied. Take an example of renowned painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Georges-Pierre Seurat. Gogh created The Starry Night (right)

   

and Seurat painted Island of La Grand Jatte (left). We don’t even need to mention about these well-painted works. It is apparent for people who are looking at this work to feel the effort and aesthetics of those works. Even this stick-man figure (took me about 30 seconds to finish this) shows some kind of meaning to the viewers that this stick figure is joyful.

This mere work used some artistic figures (smiling expression) in order to show that I tried to express the happiness of the character. Anyway, the point is that I defined art as something that needs some kind of symbol in order to please public or at least make the public understand the creator’s intention.

It turned out to be that Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece “No.5" defies my definition. No matter how hard I tried to find some symbols in the work, I could only see randomly thrown paintings. I attempted to draw lines between the paintings just in case the paint showed some alphabetic order. I failed. What emotion is supposed to be aroused for a painting like this? Then, a whim hit my mind. Art is not just about the image subordinate to how the public perceives. Art is just the artist's method to express his or her thought and the only thing that matters the most is what meaning the creator imposes on it. 

Number 5 by Jackson Pollock is, at first glance, chaotic and fitful. It might be viewed as an expression of Jackson's whim-unintentional outbursting ideas which are randomly placed. However, it warrants the second glace, even more, because the more one looks at it, the deeper one gets to recognize the implicit balance of colors of this work. I'm in crush with Jackson Pollock's whim.