Bradley Rubenstein is now officially an arthole. Rubenstein is a painter and long time resident of Greenpoint. In the hopes of getting him to review all the shows out in Brooklyn that I’ll never get to, I’m letting him cut his teeth on a museum show.


My Six Year Old Could Review That
by Bradley Rubenstein


No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Ave [betw. 89th & 90th Sts.], 212.423.3500
http://www.guggenheim.org/new_york_index.shtml

Through September 29

Untitled (Green Silver), ca. 1949. Enamel and aluminum paint on paper mounted on canvas. 22 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches.
The current exhibit at the Guggenheim enjoins the now half an age old debate as to whetherornothecouldactuallydraw and shows Pollock overcoming his personal limitations to develop something other. Pollock did not just develop a way of working, he developed a way of working through: styles, materials and personal demons. He consumed his own innovations with such fervor that by the time he reached his signature poured style he was already a cliché, done. Yes, it is the 50th anniversary of his death or something, and yes, a Pollock show is always (usually) worth seeing, but in this case seeing the drawings in the context of the Guggenheim's über-modern architecture points up the struggle he faced trying to define what it meant for him to be modern.

The gems of the show aren't the delicately laced Duco drawings but the transitional early pieces. Whether Pollock was quoting his shrink in this work, really did a lot of reading up at the library, or was actually trying to unlearn how to draw (see Clement Greenberg) these pieces persisted for him and would be resurrected later in his black and white works like Portrait and A Dream. By the time we get to the end of the Pollock story, we are usually depressed because he had "lost it" (again see Clement Greenberg) or had "fallen off the wagon" (or is that “on the wagon?”) or whatever. I would like to think that he never really lost anything. Maybe these drawings were always lying around the studio, a reminder of just how far he had gone with the work. No matter how tight that final corner he painted himself into was, it was still worlds bigger than the one he had painted himself out of 15 years earlier.