The Transcendent Line: Comparing Line in Jackson Pollock and Piero Manzoni

Jackson Pollock, "One", 1949

Piero Manzoni, "Line", 1959

A line. Simplistic and nude, the line bounds and sets loose, delimits and describes. It unites points of space into order, into oneness, allowing depth and physical transport into the canvas. With line, sun-flushed mountains crag up, bowls of fruit retain their freshness, reality is remade and reshaped. Yet what happens when the line makes no attempt at figuration—when it exists only for itself? Or when the artist stashes the line out of sight to be imagined and not seen? Pollock’s 1949 Number One and Manzoni’s Lines challenge the viewer to connect new meaning to line, to conceive of it in a rawer, elementary form

Pollock’s Number One [1949] is characteristic of his work during this period of magnificent productivity. It feels full, skyrocketed with energetic swoops, golden mustard splotches, and tangles of whiplashing white lines. The white lines are the most energetic, constantly swerving off course, asking questions, threatening to leap off in a fuse of white energy. Then there is a thumpy drizzle of grey and blue hints. If you examine the painting closely you are surprised by touches of maroon, fills of jellybean pink and chocolate. Color and line appear to merge. The eye leaps about the canvas seeking a point on which to rest but finds none. As Greenberg suggests, the piece has a definite “flatness”—the webs deny any ability to move in or through the canvas or inhabit its space. Then there is the scale of the piece: five feet three inches by eight feet six inches. The viewer must contend with it.

If Pollock’s work is, in a sense, closed off then Manzoni’s Lines exists in solitary confinement. In Lines, Manzoni painted a straight ink line, varying from less than a meter up to seven kilometers, down a roll of paper, then rolled the paper up and placed it within a cylindrical container, always cardboard with the exception of two in chromed metal, and the longest one in a cylinder made of lead (Foster et al., 414). On the exterior of the case, Manzoni wrote the length of the line, the composition date, and signed it. Yet while the title describes only the rolled up sheaf of paper bearing the line, the tube itself functions as an art object: the contrast between the tan paper and black container, the sharp handwriting, and the mystery of the unopened. That Manzoni altered the materials of the cylinder also suggests the importance of the container as well as the contained. The piece echoes Manzoni’s earlier Artist’s Shit, which plays with the same elements of enclosure, shock-value, and a critical appraisal of the power of the artist’s signature or “aura.” Reinforcing the conceit of Lines, Manzoni specified that the tubes were to be exhibited closed. To see the lines, they must be imagined.

Pollock’s lines never say too much. A journalist, William Wright, once asked Jackson Pollock, “Would it be true to say that the artist is painting from the unconscious, and the—canvas must act as the unconscious of the person who views it?” Pollock’s answer appears at a tangent: “Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are used more as sticks rather than brushes—the brush doesn’t touch the surface of the canvas, it’s just above.” Pollock answers the question of intention, of how to read his work, with a description of process. In a way, he is describing what Kaprow describes in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”—the twin appreciation of the vital creation act and the work itself. In viewing the work there is an echo of Pollock’s primal creation act—the canvas on the floor, the mind and the stick hovering above it, Pollock utterly inside the work. How does this relate to Pollock’s lines? Pollock’s lines are not interested in explaining themselves, in speaking a figure, any more than Pollock himself. They suggest only themselves and their creation. As Pollock suggests, there is no ideal, artist-approved way of reading them.

I would contrast Pollock’s rather cagey quote with one from Piero Manzoni’s manifesto, where he proclaims, “… we search for the discovery of our first Images. Images, which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be” (Manzoni, 80). The essence of Manzoni’s art is the fundamental reduction of human mythology into an image. Lines attempts to approach the imagined space, the Platonic conception of the perfect line, by hiding it from vision, announcing it only on the surface of containers. It is curious to wonder whether Pollock or Manzoni’s lines are more “absolute”. Manzoni’s lines approach the absolute: they exist independently, they are total in themselves, but in the sense of absolute as having total power, I would incline towards Pollock.

Embedded within the two works is Greenberg’s influential essay on Modernist Painting, which declared that: “Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else” (Greenberg, 87). Pollock’s work forms a foundation for Greenberg’s criticism. Out of it arises the Greenberg’s vocabulary of “color-space,” “allover” uniformity, and the “haptic” versus the “optic” (Foster et al, 439). Pollock’s lines in Number One adhere to the plane, denying figuration. According to Greenberg, Pollock’s lines are so flat that the canvas lacks an optical center or focal point, line functions then to create “a kind of luminous atmosphere, formerly the province of color” (Foster et al, 357). Pollock’s line thus transcend the typical restraints of reality and achieve abstraction—as Fried argues, Pollock’s line delimits “nothing—except, in a sense, eyesight” (Fried quoted in Foster et al., 357). Manzoni, on the other hand, plays with this conception of flatness by rolling the line up, breaking the flat plane. He attempts, tongue-in-cheek, to achieve transcendence of a different order by challenging the viewer to imagine the perfect line. Manzoni’s line is delimited only by our mind’s ability to spool it out.

Both works draw lines, demarcating themselves from the ordinary, the everyday. The lines do what Pollock said the best modern painters do, “They work from within” (Pollock, 22). In weighing the two works against each other, one must appreciate the jester in Manzoni’s work, but I believe it is the “absolute,” the “all-over” subsumption of the eye by Pollock’s visible line that carries us past the everyday.

Works Cited
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-alain Bois, and Benjamin h.d. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004. Print.
Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Print.
Kaprow, Alan. The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958) in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Print.
Manzoni, Piero. For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.
Pollock, Jackson. Interview with William Wright (1950). Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.