Jackson Pollock. Inner and outer space

In the late 1980’s, my first proper job was working as a designer for the Anthony d’Offay Gallery. I remember the first time I went to the gallery on Dering Street for my interview. The artist exhibiting was Gerhard Richter. His show was made up of massive abstracts. These were made by layering different coloured oil paints onto a canvas and then dragging a silk screen squeegee across them.

There was no form or shape, other than to me that they looked like waterfalls – powerfully majestic, beautiful, crafted, poetic, transcendental. I ended up working with some of the great artists of the late 21st Century. I thought of this happy memory when reading Jonathan Jones article about Jackson Pollock and what abstract art can teach us Abstract art unlocks the truth about the universe.

He writes

It was Jackson Pollock. The first time I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his paintings hit me like waves of power, truth and revelation. But a revelation of what? The unresolved nature of abstract painting is part of its authority. It intimates secrets that seem both personal and cosmic, but it does not spell everything out. His paintings are of inner and outer space. They intuit a complex reality that cannot be put into words. He spins out some delicate weft of insight, at once mystical, scientific and psychological. Abstract art is majestic. Mark Rothko’s paintings in Tate Modern prove that, as much as Pollock did.

And he summarizes

The discovery that truth is subjective is the root of abstract art. It is also a fundamental insight of modern physics. Perhaps that is why, in front of Pollock, I feel I am seeing the shape of the universe itself.

Looking at Pollocks work got me thinking about physicist Lee Smolin and wilderness writer Robert MacFarlane. Smolin writes, No living system is an isolated system. We all ride flows of matter and energy – flows driven ultimately by the energy from the sun. Once enclosed in a box (in a prefiguration of our eventual internment), we die. Macfarlane adds Natural forces – wild energies – often have the capacity to frustrate representation. Our most precise descriptive language, mathematics cannot fully account for or predict the flow of water down a stream, or the movements of a glacier, or the turbulent rush of wind across uplands. Such actions behave in such ways that they are chaotic: they operate to feedback systems of unresolvable delicacy and intricacy.

MacFarlane and Smolin also make the point that our natural world can also use order and repetition, but only when it makes sense, blending the two together, that can as MacFarlane says, lend a near mystical sense of organisation to a place. As a small aside there is a saying, when civilisations fall, the only thing left is art. What to make something that is resilient and enduring?

So what can Jackson Pollock teach us?

That our world is connected, interconnected and networked at a cosmological level.
Open systems thrive on diversity.
That our natural world can also use order and repetition, but only when it makes sense, so nature blends – depending what is needed.
The laws of nature are dynamic.
Real beauty endures not because it is attractive but because it is great work resolved at a macro and micro level.
Creativity is what brings the new into the world

These are design principles. So when thinking about what we create, design and make, then we should heed these principles. They may not be the hard edged tools of implementation, but we always need a set of guiding principles to frame what we believe and what is possible.

Journey Further:

Open systems evolve to states of higher organization
Living on the edge of chaos
Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (Living Bibliography)
Yeo Valley Farms, a masterclass in business transformation (post)
Openness the new model for society (post)
On Beauty (post)