Post 2

1. I knew going into the second half of the film there would be discord and madness, but not until I actually watched the film did I know to what degree. I believe the film set us up for this transition in several ways. First of all, the movie began almost how it ended. We see Pollock drunk, stumbling up the stairs, rambling on and right then and there you know that this man has issues. Another sign is his temper tantrums throughout the film. In the very beginning while he eats with Lee, his brother and his wife and his mother, we see him lose it and later he cries uncontrollably to his brother, almost like a little child would. As the story progresses, we see even more outbreaks. The one that really alerts you to the tragedy that is about to ensue is the argument about having a baby. Lee and his argument only foreshadows their relationship in the years to come. A major turning point for Pollock was when he began making the movie. I don’t know exactly what set him off, but something about the whole experience of being filmed made him look at his life in a different life. At this point he snaps and reverts back into bad habits and once again loses his temper. After the moment, everything goes downhill. We discussed in class if the movie made it seem like a mental illness or the alcohol. I truly believe that one can come to the conclusion that he was mentally disturbed on their own, but the movie intensely focuses on the alcohol being the sole problem. Everytime he has a drink the camera focuses in on the act, and then we have a whole scene where he is biking while juggling a box of glass beer bottles. Finally, I thought the ending was very dramatic and hard hitting, but I feel like Pollock got to that point way to soon. In the film, we get a caption towards the end that says 5 years later. All of a sudden, we see someone who is almost unrecognizable. Pollock has become a monster of some sort. We asked the question as a class, “What happened in those 5 years.” I think the transition was way to drastic and it would have been nice to see a little more of what went on during that missing time period to better understand why Pollock turned out to be the way he was.


2. While reading Nietzsche’s piece on Apollo and the Dionysus, the artist Pollock popped in my head many times. The first part of the reading that grabbed me was the second paragraph on page 2. The paragraph first discusses that an excited artist “behaves in relation to the reality of dreams. He looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life…” This quote instantly made me think of the life of Jackson Pollock because of the fact that Pollock was very much living in a “fantasy” world. The film portrays this numerous amounts of time, whether he is shown staring into space, laying in a field staring at the open sky, or having one of his raging episodes. For him, he was living in a dream world and everything had to be a certain way. In this world, he would be famous and the number one artist forever, even though this is impossible.
Another quote that stood out to me was “The man is no longer an artist. He has become a work of art. The artistic power of all of nature, the rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the intoxicated performance. The finest clay, the most expensive marble — man — is here worked and chiseled, and the cry of the Eleusianian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?” (4). I feel that Pollock really did become his art. He became radical and abstract like his work. Also, I could not help but think of him when the word intoxicated is used. I know this is not meant literally in this piece, but it actually works both ways with Pollock, since he was consumed with his art work as well as alcohol. The last line of this paragraph relates to him as well, considering he was always very upset when no one recognized his work and he was not acknowledged in the art world.
As for the question “Can we see Pollock (the man) as "simultaneously an artist of intoxication and dreams?" I completely see him as such. He was driven by an artistic dream (apollonian) and also lost himself in this dream (Dionysian). “It is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous throng, and how through the Apollonian effects of dream his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in a metaphorical dream picture” (4) The reading states that this happening is like those in Greek Tragedies. In Greek Tragedy there is always a man who starts out with great power or success, but somehow loses himself and therefore loses everything. Pollock’s life can definitely be categorized as a Greek tragedy, but with all this said I still do not excuse Pollock’s behavior at the end of his life. I disagree with the reading that all of this is a force that takes someone over. I believe everyone is responsible for his or her own actions in life.

3. So far I am enjoying the film Basquiat. It is a refreshing difference from the movie Pollock and I am excited to see where his life takes him next. I believe there is already some foreshadowing of his future. In the very beginning of the film, we see a young boy and his mother walking in an art gallery. She begins to cry. Although I am not sure why the painting makes her cry, I believe this sadness could be symbolic of sadness that encounters Basquiat in his life. Also, something that I found to be foreshadowing was the character of Andy Warhol being introduced. From what I know of Andy Warhol, a lot of tragedy surrounded his life and people he associated with like Edie Sedwig. I know that Basquiat and Andy become friends, therefore knowing all of this I feel like it foreshadows the fact he will become famous and he will start doing more drugs because in Andy Warhol’s Factory many people did many different drugs, and it will lead to his destruction. Looking at the schematic structure of the artist, we have already seen in the movie thus far his signs of early promise in art, and we just ended where he will meet Andy Warhol, which will be discovery by a recognized artist.