Friday March 29, 2024
Pollocks to the experts!
Review

Pollocks to the experts!

October 31 2008

Who the !!! is Jackson Pollock?, ABC TV Sunday November 9 at 8.30pm and Sunday, November 16 at 3pm

JACKSON Pollock is one of the great figures in 20th century art and thanks to Gough Whitlam, Australia has its very own bargain Pollock: the fabled Blue Poles. It was a bargain when picked up for $1.3 million back in 1973 and is now worth 40 times that. Which is a bad thing, come to think of it, because the way arts minister Peter Garrett keeps selling out the arts community, he could take it into his head to flog it any day now. But I digress.

Fast forward 10 or 15 years to a junk shop somewhere along a highway in California. Long distance truck driver Teri Horton stopped by for a poke among the bric a brac and came across a big old painting that caught her eye. She bought it for $5 and skipped out of the shop reckoning – as she says – she’d won the lottery.

The now 73-year-old Teri is no ordinary truckie, she recognised the picture as a work by Jackson Pollock and she figured it was worth squillions. But she had not bargained on the poobahs of the art world whose opinion was that its provenance – discovered by a working class nobody in a thrift shop – just didn’t cut the mustard. The art establishment refused to acknowledge the picture.

Presumably you learn to be fairly tough and resourceful as a female long distance truck driver in the US, and Teri Horton was one of those. She refused to let the mouflons of the upper reaches of art intimidate her. She began a 15 year quest to prove she was right and that she’d bought a masterpiece for five bucks.

Pollocks to the experts!

She consulted art dealers (from the dodgy end of town, admittedly) and bona fide forensic scientists. The forensic evidence is compelling: a finger print on a paint can in Pollock’s studio matches a print on the back of the canvas; and paint from the floor of the studio has also been matched to the paint on Teri’s canvas. Proof enough, surely? Apparently not.

The ABC has secured the screening rights to this doco about Teri’s excellent adventures in paint and it has to be worth a viewing for anyone interested in art, life, stubborn adherence to principle and the inane shenanigans of the art establishment. Learn, for instance that forensic science, DNA and finger prints don’t count with them. They may also believe the earth is flat – tune in to find out.

 

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