The process involves an extension into the time and space of the action. The event of the making of the work puts the artist in a trance. In action extending out over the edge beyond sense, where only the sensuous continuity remains. It is unavoidable to construe metaphor out of the mark-making. In order to represent marks were understood as something besides themselves, as standing for something. Pollock’s work goes beyond this representational writing but the mark making still takes on a quality, a character as an index. Of that which gave rise to the making – its tempo, its state of mind (or out of mind). In Pollock one of the central metaphors is totality: specifically a totality of endlessness – “Oneness” -this totality is a dissonant incrustation. In the drip paintings there is no compartmentalizing or hierarchy of parts. There is a kind of flow laterally across the field. It creates an image that fixes itself as a record of instantaneous impacts. The other metaphor is that of handwriting set into uncertainty, even randomness, crossing out writing. Experience is not adopting usual discursive modes. Pollock is out there in the wilderness. Endless difference. It may be a fiction, but it is a useful one: it purports to divest oneself of the I.
