White-Collar Labour and Its Discontents: Jackson Pollock’s DIY

This chapter explores Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings in the context of changing US labour practices. Pollock’s technique is the result, in part, of an engagement with the ascendant domination of white-collar work in the midcentury economy: with how it transformed everyday life, drew the very question of work into question, and changed the iconography of the worker. I propose that Pollock’s painting is rooted, in form and content, in appropriations and performances of manual labour, resourced from his own working history and the emergence of DIY as an industry and counterweight to white-collar labour. In this, it responds to the anxieties of the male white-collar world: about the colonisation of the intellect by work discipline, the atrophy of the body in knowledge work, the alienation of the white-collar worker from his products, and the perceived feminisation of work. After moving through the contexts of the national labour regime, Pollock’s working life and the home improvements at Springs, the discussion analyses three paintings from across the drip period. In all, the chapter offers a frame for Pollock’s transcendent masculinity, at the threshold of technical virtuosity and no technique at all, providing a political context for Pollock that is not simply the Cold War.