著者

岸 みづき キシ ミズキ KISHI Mizuki

出版者

東北芸術工科大学

雑誌

東北芸術工科大学紀要 = Bulletin of Tohoku University of Art and Design

巻号頁・発行日

vol.18, pp.26-37, 2011-10-31

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In July 1943, Jackson Pollock was commissioned to create a mural-sized painting for the entrance hall of Peggy Guggenheim' s town house in New York. He painted the work, titled Mural, in December 1943 or during the first weeks of January of the next year. Later, Pollock described this work as a precedent in a new genre of "large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural", which he intended to create.This paper aims to demystify this function between easel and mural through the examination of the formal structure of Mural, shedding light on the importance of figurative forms he drew in the work. First, I will examine the way in which he made the composition, comparing it with Picasso's "curvilinear cubist" paintings around the second half of the 1920s, which Pollock studied at that time. Second, I will analyze the formal structure of the work by introducing Rosalind Krauss' interpretation of Picasso's collage which redefines collage as Saussure's sign system, a relationship between signifier and signified. And Finally, I will discuss the work's effect towards viewers and consider its quality as a mural. Like Picasso, Pollock made small planes in his Mural. However, unlike Picasso's, Pollock's planes don't function as signifier since they don't have difference. He, instead, introduced pictographic figures among the planes and emphasized materiality of them to give viewers spatial and tactile effects. By doing so, Mural functions as a field in which viewers can perceive graphic signs physically. To conclude, this field is the half way state from easel to mural that Pollock aimed to realize. Keywords: Jackson Pollok, Abstract Expressionism, Mural