Jackson Pollock and the Wormhole of Creativity

I reiterate: the goal of the creative process is to enable a transformation. The supreme creator attracts matter of all kind, internalises it, makes it his interior; via heavy intellectual concentration, via introspection, under its own weight and gravity it collapses into a black hole; this will open up a hyperdimensional channel through ordinary spacetime fabric, a wormhole; which will then eject the transformed, channeled, dimensionally challenged, warped interior in a complete other region in space and time, via a white hole. This is, then, a true transformation. Though we have recently managed to detect black holes, no one has ever seen the astronomical object of a white hole. But in creative processes, in the arts, you can, from time to time, encounter white holes. The signature paintings of Jackson Pollock, the drip paintings, are probably most exemplary of such white holes.

Pollock, a ruminative, cautious, uncommunicative fellow, seeked to gain access to the spiritual, the “unconscious”, via ancient symbols, totems, and the like. He was less interested in “figuration” or “abstraction” per se but wanted to express his interior via painting. He also wanted to paint “American”, for which there had been no actual template at that time. Well before he had come up with his drip paintings he already had been the only American artist who was able to free himself from the hitherto predominant European influence and to paint in a truly independent manner. He was the only American painter at this time who was able to achieve this. Like Picasso, Pollock was a great painter in the classical sense. Laypersons may suspect Pollock´s or Picasso´s paintings as “something a child could do”. But it can not. Both Pollock and Picasso were great painters that were in need to push boundaries. Via their breakthrough inventions, they seemingly eliminated boundaries and created a new spacetime, a new dimensionality, where stuff unfolds in all kinds of manners, according to the logic of these dimensionalities. That´s when they became greater than just “great”.

Pollock was explosive and highly energetic all along, but he was also highly introspective and creatively introverted. He was sucked into the abyss of his own creative introspection. When he finally channeled through the wormhole and released his energy through the white hole of his drip paintings, he actually managed to “fully express himself” and “turn his inside out”, to fully deliver, via his action painting, his “unconscious”. There is no distance anymore between himself and his paintings, between his expressions and that what is expressed. That was something new again. From a black hole nothing gets out and into a white hole nothing gets in. A white hole is a permanent explosion. Pollock´s drip paintings are said to be both ecstatic and monumental. They are both dynamic and frozen in a statuariness; they are, creatively, tranquil and calm. The are complete. They are, maybe, the world process from a God´s perspective. From a more mundane standpoint – which is yet extremely elevated and something in its own right as well – Pollock managed to do paintings that cannot be counterfeited or duplicated. What a wormhole! What a white hole!

Black holes, white holes and wormholes are logical, though dimensionally different from spacetime as we know it, or they are spacetime in reverse. Their core, their most interior, remains mysterious nevertheless. Scientists suspect that around a singularity anything can happen, as the common laws of the physical universe break down at this point. In the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, anything happens.

Pollock, they noted, had a unique perception. He could see moving things and movements per se. He could see things from all angles. He had a superdimensional perception. Art, they demand, should let you gaze into another dimension. In the case of Pollock you see the entire dimensionality of the creative process. That is to say: let your stuff, via introspection, collapse into a black hole, dimensionally channel it though a wormhole, and release it through a white hole, unexpectedly, in some completely other part of the universe. This makes, then, a true transformation.