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| Detail from Cathedral, Jackson Pollock, 1948 |
Pollock may not be an obvious choice when discussing the systematic nature of visual art. But it is an enlightening one.
Pollock painted much of his late work (from about 1945) using a technique of dripping paint onto the canvas. The canvas would be flat on the table or on the ground. Pollock would walk around the canvas and drip paint from the end of a stick or directly from a can, making trails of paint which looked very much like splashes.
The detail from Cathedral (currently in Dallas) shown above, shows approximately the top quarter of a two metre high by a metre wide image (not one of his biggest works). The image is built up in many layers by the artist laying down colour after colour using this dripping technique.
What is systematic about that?
To start with, each picture from that period looks just like the next. It looks different from his earlier work and it looks different from all his contemporaries. The system involved here is one of simple repetition. The artist makes a series of works each a variation of its predecessor. In that sense, all artists are systematic.
But if you looks closely at Pollock's work, each splash looks just like the rest (in a sense I will describe). So the process he has adopted of loading his stick with paint and then dripping paint from it while moving is systematic. Nearly always the same amount of paint. Nearly always the same amount of movement. Nearly always from the nearly the same height above the canvas. Each stroke placed near an earlier stroke.
The sense in which each splash looks just like the rest is a type of random regularity often found in nature. Two leaves on the same plant are nearly alike. Two onions are nearly alike. They are not identical, but the process that produced them is a systematic one with small random perturbations that creates random regularity.
So Pollock is more systematic than is perhaps obvious. His process was systematic and this lead to similar products as it does with all artists.
Pollock's process can be coded as - Splash Till Done. He moves around the canvas trying to achieve an impression of an idea that he wishes to express. He continues to drip until that objective is reached. Pollock's emotional output is achieved only when he is finally happy that he has reached that original objective.
Aldous Huxley is reported to have said (in 1948) on seeing Cathedral as a member of a judging panel - I paraphrase - He could have gone on dripping forever, how did he decide to stop when he did? That got a laugh from the panel, presumably the author's intention. But the answer to Huxley's question is actually very illuminating. Pollock stopped when he knew he was finished.
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I wrote about this topic in November 2013 at a time when I was trying to generate images that were Pollock-like. See that post at http://systemsartblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/systematic-pollock.html