Artifact: Behind the Drip

Charles Paul Freund from the April 2002 issue

Do Jackson Pollock's notorious post-war "drip" canvases -- above is a detail from his famous Number 22 -- actually contain a hidden mathematical pattern? According to a story in Discover magazine, the physicist and art historian Richard Taylor is convinced that they do. Taylor argues that Pollock's work is not the random visual chaos that his critics derided, but instead reflects the logic of chaos theory and fractal geometry. That is, unlike other spontaneous-drip artists, Pollock created canvases with a single dominant pattern that is repeated, at various magnifications, throughout.

As part of his research, Taylor has invented the "Pollockizer," a mechanical fractal-drip device. Of course, whether Pollock intended his fractal results is unknown. What is demonstrable are the repeated patterns, the eye's preference for such subtle variation over both visual disorder and plane geometric regularity, and a far greater continuing interest in Pollock than in any of his spontaneous paint-throwing imitators.

Art has always developed in close conjunction with science and math. Renaissance perspective requires the idea of infinity, and thus of zero. Impressionists painted not objects, but light. Artists have had to be chemists, physicists, and mathematicians in order to be artists at all. As for Pollock, he may not have been working with fractals in mind, but as Discover notes, his work may nevertheless be "testing the limits of what the human eye would find aesthetically pleasing."

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