[2/3] Deck Making and Art: Action Painting
The previous installment talked about how photography kickstarted the modern art movement, and the beginning of Cubism. We saw how our decks can take inspiration from Cubist art and create that which befits our story the most. Our slides are the cast members in this story, and in this part, we look at how to bring this story to life.
All art is a performance
Its the 1940s - photography is now over a century old. The 2nd World War is over, but war-time immigration has definitively shifted the centre of modern art from Southern Europe to USA. As often happens with the churn of thoughts and mixing of cultures, modern art has continued to grow and push its boundaries by asking questions of itself. One such important question came from Jackson Pollock in 1950.
Pollock saw the painting canvas as a space for action. He placed it on the floor of his studio, and with a dripping brush of paint moved over and around it as if in a frenzy. By allowing the dripping paint to form traces of his movement on the canvas, he was changing the very nature of art itself: that all art is a performance and a painting is nothing but a record of that performance. Indeed, photographs of him painting were as much talked about as were the paintings themselves.
This was the birth of “Action Painting”, a technique that wrapped the art and the artist together in a singular moment of spontaneity. The canvas is no longer a separate entity, but an extension of the artist, and the painting - an abstraction of its creator’s mind. For the rest of his career, Pollock continued to experiment further and his descent into arthouse madness brought him to the brink of asking an even deeper question: What is the true nature of art?
The answer to the question came almost 50 years later from an unexpected source: chaos theory and fractal geometry. Fractals are repeating patterns at various magnifications that are the visible remains of chaotic systems - systems that obey rules at the micro level but are so sensitive to slight changes that their macro outcome is difficult to predict. Such fractals are the basic building blocks of nature and in 1999, art historian and mathematician Richard Taylor discovered that Pollock’s drip paintings are actually fractal patterns. Jackson Pollock had unknowingly adopted nature’s pattern generation processes, and the resulting paintings didn’t replicate nature-they were small pieces of nature itself!
Unfortunately this brilliant mind’s quest was cut-short at an untimely age of 44, merely 6 years after the completion of “Autumn Rhythm”. Nevertheless, his techniques leave us today with an invaluable lesson in the world of deck making: a presentation is, first and foremost, a performance by the presenter.
The true essence of a presentation is in the way the presenter narrates their story and cajoles the audience with the support of their deck. The presenter is the lead in that little show, and the slides are merely the supporting cast. However, cajoling the audience is not easy without hooking the audience’s attention first. Often we see creators prefering all their slides to be uniform and coherent so as not to give a jerky experience to the audience. Yet a presentation is all about hooking that elusive focus of the audience, and this can only be done by making a slide look different, much like the first scene of the first act of a staged Shakespeare. I have known even seasoned presenters get into the trap of making their deck look coherent and pretty on paper, at the cost of losing the hook.
Of course it goes without saying that in the world of business and professional deck making, we don’t ask enough questions to recreate Pollock’s rhapsody in our slides. However, it is important to be unhesitant in ensuring that our slides complement our story and that we are bold in the way we do it, as beautifully brought out by David Phillips here.
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