“When I first saw that painting, I thought it was so ugly my friend and I were going to throw darts at it,” deadpans Teri Horton. That is until a local art instructor told Horton that, although he was no expert, it looked like that ugly, dartboard-bound painting might very well be by the hand of none other than Jackson Pollock. “Who the fuck is Jackson Pollock?” retorted Horton, and so begins Harry Moses’ documentary.
Truck-driving, trailer-abiding Teri may not have been totally au fait with Pollock’s oeuvre, which encompasses some of the priciest works of the Western canon, but she was about to become something of an expert. Horton, who loves a bargain, purchased the “ugly” action painting in a California thrift store for the princely sum of five bucks (bargained down from eight, she points out), and Moses’ movie, Who The Fuck Is Jackson Pollock?, traces her subsequent battle to prove her thrifty Pollock as the real deal and not, well, a load of Pollocks, because if it’s real Horton stands to make $50 million north of her five-dollar investment. What emerges from the documentary is not just one woman’s crusade to prove the authenticity of the unsigned work, but an exposure of the rarely mentioned inequalities in American society.
“The contrast between Horton’s trailer park life and the rarified ‘art world’ people she was dealing with is both striking and funny,” says Nico Mesterharm, Meta House director. The comedy genius is Horton herself, cussing her way from Texas to Tribeca, accumulating hard evidence of the painting’s authenticity along the way. “The whole art world is a fraud,” says Teri, and as she recounts her battles with the art world cognoscenti you kind of have to agree: on one side of the argument, Teri and an array of forensic evidence; on the other, a motley collection of supercilious aficionados. “If I were just a night watchman at the Museum Of Modern Art instead of the director you could dismiss my opinion,” opines one pompously; “It simply doesn’t sing like a Pollock!” shrills another. Tough luck, mate: with Pollock’s fingerprints all over it, the painting can sing like a canary for all Horton cares.
Which brings us to the man who left those fingerprints. For all the art crowd’s possessiveness over Pollock, the artist probably had more in common with fiery Horton than with the pseuds over at MOMA, a point which is appositely, if clunkily, made throughout the movie. “Pollock was an alcoholic and had a volatile personality,” explains Mesterharm. “Artists tend to be extreme. Great artists are even more extreme. I guess that is what makes them special and, on the other hand, hard to cope with. But in the end they are judged by their works, not by their behaviour.”
Like the best (worst?) of the Beat generation, Pollock’s behaviour was far from Sunday schoolish. Damaged, incendiary, alcoholic, he spent years holed up in his Long Island studio before dying in a drink-related car accident in which his mistress was also killed. But as Mesterharm notes, it is Pollock’s work and not his jerk that has been his legacy: his drip paintings have gone on to become some of the world’s most expensive, housed in museums worldwide.
Jose Pineda, also known as Frisco Tony, will be playing blues with his band The Beatniks after the documentary. He hopes that some of Pollock’s renegade spirit will imbue his set. “Jazz is often described as American classical music, [but it] was also a lifestyle that revolved around sex, drugs and civil disobedience. Blues was a child of jazz, developed in the same vein by black Americans. Jazz and blues both celebrate rebellion and civil rights, sexuality and the use of drugs and alcohol as sacraments to combat the power of the White Power Elite. The spirit of Jackson Pollack will be with us on Friday and I am sure he will be digging cool jazz, dancing to the blues, abusing his substances of choice and trying to pick a cool chick-muse.”
Substance abuse and pick-ups are of course entirely ancillary activities when watching art documentaries and appreciating Frisco Tony’s beats. Civil disobedience and rebellion are, as always for Advisor readers, mandatory (as is minding your Jackson Pollocks).
WHO: Teri Horton on the big screen, Frisco Tony and the Beatniks on the blues, DJ Nico on the decks
WHAT: Who The Fuck Is Jackson Pollock? screening followed by live blues, beat poetry and jazz
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm August 23
WHY: Definitely NOT a load of old Pollocks