Summertime, Jackson Pollock, China, 2009
16mm (painted by Chen Shun Zheng, Xiamen,
music by Morton Feldman)
In China there are oil painting villages where you
can order your own van Gogh or Rembrandt,
which they will exactly copy for you from the cata-
logue. Here I gave the painter an impossible assign-
ment; to exactly copy a Jackson Pollock.The cho-
sen painting is Summertime, which is the painting
that was adorning the cover, with Jackson Pollock
at the peak of his fame, of Life Magazine in 1949.
The short film is a reference to the famous documen-
tary Jackson Pollock 51, made by Hans Namuth
and Paul Falkenberg. During fiilming Namuth told
him when to start and stop painting and it is said that
after filming there was a big argument between
Namuth and Pollock shouting to each other they
were ‘phony’. From then on, Pollock reverted to
a more figure-oriented style
of painting, leading some
to say that Namuth’s sessions robbed Pollock of
his rawness and made Pollock come to feel disinge-
nuous about doing things for the camera that he had
originally done spontaneously. |
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2009
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