| By Nicola Behrman "Everybody knows that a fairy tale starts out, ‘Once upon a time,' but a truck-driver's tale starts out, ‘You ain't going to believe this shit.'" So says Teri Horton, subject of Who the &%$# is Jackson Pollock? - a seventy-three-year-old female former trucker with coiffured blonde hair and a trucker's mouth to boot. Horton's documentary-worthy tale began more than ten years ago when she was rifling through a thrift store looking for a little something to cheer up a depressed buddy. Amongst the junk, she discovered a painting that, in her own words, was downright ugly but, clearly, worth purchasing as soon as she'd haggled the price down from eight dollars to five. And so the stuff of folklore is created: Her friend hates the piece, not to mention the fact that it won't fit through the front of her trailer, so Teri puts it in a garage sale where, on perusal, a local art teacher drops the name "Jackson Pollock" - to which Teri, now famously, responded, "Who the $#&% is Jackson Pollock?" And so commenced an investigation, which has since led to a battle, over whether the painting, now under lock and key in New York, is indeed an original Pollock. If the tale proves true, the five-dollar find would be valued in the tens of millions of dollars. However, without the "provenance" prerequired by the "Art" world, Teri and her painting are mostly rejected, pooh-poohed and, ultimately, ignored by the establishment. The film, which premiered at the 2006 Hamptons International Film Festival, accompanies Teri on a journey filled with believers (her family, a European forensic examiner named Peter Paul Biro and several ex-cons) and non-believers (New York curators, museum folk and friends of Pollock) in a perfect David vs. Goliath story that weighs in on the ongoing debate of just who gets to call art "Art." The characters are titillating, and marvelously do their bit to represent their camps. One certainly couldn't have asked for a better performance from Thomas Roving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who puts the pomp in pompous in his magnificently hilarious appraisal of the painting, head bopping this way and that, body contorting in all directions before declaring the dumpster discovery "dead on arrival." Teri's fervor is equally intoxicating, yet, as climactic as it should have been to discover a fingerprint that matches Pollock's own on the back of the painting, as exciting as it should be that there is supposedly forensic evidence backed up by an expert (with a British accent no less), somehow the quest's failure to find a larger following begins to ring hollow. This is, of course, all an enormous shame, for aside from wanting Teri to triumph and having the opportunity to see what the former trucker does with her millions, viewers encounter the important underlying debate. And, while the forensics flow in focus from fine art to fingerprints, the documentary, in its unconventional manner, seems to support the view that art for art's sake still capitulates to commerce. And the controversy continues... An MPM reader shares his knowledge on the question. Click here for his Letter to the Editor. |
