Over time I began to question my personal involvement in the work surrounding conceptual art. A large part of the questioning was driven by working on an exhibition that had become all-consuming and had brought me to a point where I felt not just my enthusiasm for conceptual art had been desiccated, but I was questioning how narrow my interest in art in general had become due to my investment in the “movement.”

In 2015, during one of my nearly daily strolls through the 5^th floor galleries of The Museum of Modern Art, seeking a palate cleanser via a return to less cerebral art, I paused for an extended length of time in front of Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) and contemplated, as the painting affords one much to contemplate. 

And, while “action painting” is frequently mashed up with the term “abstraction,” doing so is confusing as an “action painting” is not a “abstraction” of a reality. Simply put, it is just what it is, the residue of the actions of the work’s making.

Standing before the Pollock, it was clear to me that coming to terms with One: Number 31, 1950 required a suspension of disbelief. Without some foreknowledge it is hard to appreciate this painting as an artwork.

Perhaps they, the museum’s visitors, know a bit about Pollock—Jack the Dribbler—who was celebrated not just by the art critics of his time, but in the popular press. That kernel of knowledge sets up the narrative that the artist had formal training and over successive years he pushed against boundaries as he advanced his work along, incrementally, towards his signature style scrawl of strewn house paints. One: Number 31, 1950 is a singular work that launched a flotilla of clichés such as “my kid could do that,” which—like any good cliché—is true to a certain degree.

I’m sure I’m not the only person that has stood before One: Number 31, 1950 and pondered the infinite monkey theorem, the “theory” that given an infinite amount of time a monkey bashing  typewriter keys at random would produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Perhaps, at the very least, a sonnet or two.

These images, reaching back to the 1930s, represent the modern challenges defining anti-illusion, action based, art.

While Pollock made conscious decisions—with regards to materials, scale, and completion—chimpanzees lack such agency. They are provided with paints, charcoal, crayons, or other pigmented media and a fixed sized sheet or canvas to work on. Perhaps a brush or other implement is offered and utilized though fingers are often the preferred tool.

What separates man from ape? In the case of action painting, it’s the capacity to make choices. Choices about materiality, scale, the reflexive nature of gestures that accentuate individual marks. Most importantly, the capacity to step away from the action of creation and recognize that a work is finished.

Over the years, as I added to my collection of these photographs, I continued to ponder how to best put them to use as a conversation starter, one specifically directed towards concerns of authorship and connoisseurship. I question why we elevate one action painter, or one painting over another when the appreciation of these artists and works is overwhelmingly subjective. How given works under the rubric of action painting are valued—by all definitions of the word—beyond that of formally similar paintings.

In the last year the rise of works produced by Artificial Intelligence platforms such as DALL-E, GPT, Stable Diffusion and other text-to-image products drew my attention for the same reasons I began to think about the distance between Pollock and primates. Critically the tether between precognition of mission involved in making a work of art and the recognition that the work is part of a continuum of historic art making that presumably only a human enjoys.