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Warren Neidich
KRASNER-POLLOCK:
ACCIDENTAL PAINTINGS, A CATALOGUE RAISONEE

According to Helen A. Harrison, recently retired

director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study

Center, the splattered paint on the floor of the

former Jackson Pollock studio was a result of

Jackson Pollack’s large scale fluid applied painting.

Easel-ess poured performative paintings which

 

took place on the horizontal surface of un-

stretched canvas strewn on the floor and beyond

 

its borders.

Pollock’s brother had given him a large collection

of square Masonite baseball game

boards, and in 1953, Pollock used them to cover

the floor of the house and studio which was later

removed by conservators to expose the wooden

floor covered with paint. After Jackson’s death in

1956, Lee took over his studio to make it her own

from 1957-1984 the time of her death. The paint

splatters on the chairs, walls, stools and the boots

 

are all residues of her unplanned and uninten-

tional efforts. Lee Krasner worked upon canvases

 

secured and taped to the walls and as a result her

accidents were mostly reflected there. (For a

while the floor was covered so in fact there was no

mixing of the paints of both there.) In effect these

 

unplanned results of the actions of different paint-

ing techniques resulting in left over residues of

 

splashed and sprayed paint on the walls, Krasner,

and floors, Pollock, are the result of an inadvertent

collaboration between Lee and Jackson, husband

and wife, in time. Not a work of synchronous and

aligned gestures of collaborative judgement but

 

the result of the spatial and temporal circum-

stances brought on by Jackson’s death and Lee’s

 

successive inhabitation. Frozen events as archi-

tectural and art historical memory

In 1994 with the permission of the study center,

Neidich removed all the framed objects on the

walls of the former studio now a study center

and exposed the wall surface behind them with

its square and horizonal shadows and impressions

left by years of oxidation between the framed

objects, air and walls; a process analogous to the

photographic process itself. The wall surfaces now

 

exposed present abstract patterns that are unin-

tentional and accidental works of art in their own

 

right. This removal was reminiscent of an earlier

work Neidich had done at the Paris Bar, Berlin in

1994 entitled Elevenement at the Paris bar, with

the late painter Martin Kippenberger and Michel

Wurtle, its owner, when he had removed all the

paintings of Kippenberger’s invited famous artist

friends who had together created a kind exquisite

corpse exhibition there. Then and there like at

 

the Krasner-Pollock Study Center he had docu-

mented similar oxidative effects on its yellow walls;

 

square and rectangular faded ghostlike shapes

appeared as a result of his “unhanging”.

What was exposed in the “unhanging” in East

Hampton were the same ghost as patterns as well

 

as the cleats that had supported the framed pic-

tures and text labels, printed on white foam core,

 

that had served as titles and descriptions for the

 

now displaced framed images. Without the orig-

inal framed material, that these labels addressed,

 

and described, the labels served another purpose.

They are transformed into a haiku, that serves as

a skeleton for a viewer’s imagination. A scaffold

for the production of scenario visualization in the

spectator’s mind’s eye. Imaginary texts to create

wonderment. Neidich added another dimension

 

by documenting his action and used the ready-

made patterns which now appeared as inspirations

 

for new works of first photographic and now, 30

years later, UV-printed transformed paintings on

gesso primed linen, blending the photographic and

painterly. The accidental and the

intentional.

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