Blue Poles

Natural selection has resulted in our being among the mammals who look at the universe, using our brains and eyes, which are windows to the skull. The universe we stare at is made up of everything that is the case, uncountable events in uneven flux. Our brains and eyes simplify parts of the flux into objects like acorns and bears. 

Armed with a sharp stick, you hope to see the bear before the bear sees you.

BLUE POLES began as one of several similar paintings made by Jackson Pollock at his peak. Pollock was, some say, the most interesting of the world's abstract expressionists. You can find BLUE POLES on the Internet. He made it in a little shed in Sparks on Long Island. There the painting was flat on the floor. Pollock bent over it, gesturing at it, making multitudinous uneven lines, creating layers of colors crossing one another. Unlike earlier artists, he made lines that were not edges and pointed to nothing. I doubt if anyone really knows what he was up to. He himself may not have been able to put that kind of complexity into words. We are uncertain how to read what he created.

We can't be sure what Pollock intended. A woman noted that you can't look at BLUE POLES from one vantage point. No matter where your  eye enters, it skitters to god-knows-where. The complexities of the crossing lines and blobs of paint are unfathomable, which led me to the speculation that Pollock was not painting objects but painting the context in which we find objects (the unmediated universe). An astute friend wrote that apparently Pollock added the poles fairly late in the process, coating lengths of lumber with Prussian Blue and slapping the wet lumber down on the painting to leave eight diagonal marks. He later overpainted the poles in places, building visual ambiguity. The poles are objectlike, set against or in a chaotic and limitless context dribbled in front and behind and beside them, a complexity that words cannot replicate.