Pollock

And this is called action painting? Of course, we all remember that footage of Pollock himself leaping and dancing above his supine canvas spooling paint in great dribbly gouts; that's action, right there--but then again there's necessarily action in the activity of any painter in her/his practice. And look at the Pollockian result: about as far, visually, from action as it is possible to get. Now, this isn't to deny that it's an image of great textural interest; and it's not to deny that it constitutes a brilliant intervention into artistic traditions of form. But it is to point out that it is, for all that, an image nevertheless of a century's accumulated spiders'-webs; of the brambles occluding passage to the princess's castle; of the hairball to which scores of residents in an appartment have contributed and which has clogged the general drain. It is a representation of blockage. To say so is not to dismiss it of course; on the contrary. But it is to query where the action, here, is.