andy merrifield

Featured image is Jackson Pollock’s Number 32 (1950) (Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum, Düsseldorf):

“Only two colours make up Pollock’s masterpiece Number 32: a light tan-coloured canvas brown over which are splattered skeins of jet-black swirls. One is struck by the energy that radiates from this composition; if you verge too close, it sucks you into its spiralling vortex. Energy enters via thin whirls and curves, puddles and drips, threads of spontaneous black. Yet there are points of convergence–snowflakes and dendrites–where the black paint thickens and is nodal, highly charged. Modest inputs spiralling inwards seem, at points of fusion, to release enormous outputs, energy that pushes outwards, a diffusion unleashing a quantity–quality reaction, a critical mass of power, the radical geography of mass encounter. They kindle radical eruptions, not random explosions, volcanic happenings rather than unannounced anarchy, because here there’s underlying regularity, some inner structuring order. For in this imagery we not only glimpse radical fractals, but also the physicists’ concept of wormhole coming to life, illusive shortcuts, tiny trails towards liberation expressing themselves before our very eyes, letting us slip through…”

— Andy Merrifield, The Politics of the Encounter (University of Georgia Press, 2013)