Pint-Sized Pollock

0 Comments POSTED: September 4, 2007 15:47 | By: Amir Bar-Lev
Marla and painting(2).jpgOn the making of My Kid Could Paint That:
Next week I'll be in Toronto to present, My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about Marla Olmstead, an internationally acclaimed four-year-old painter. Marla's abstract paintings sold for as much as $25,000 a piece, but when her father was accused of secretly authoring the paintings, their value plummeted overnight.

"Isn't it the same painting whether a four-year-old or a 40-year-old made
it?"

It's an interesting question. If a collector spends thousands of dollars on, say, the typewriter with which Jack Kerouac wrote On The Road, and it turns out later that this typewriter was never used by Kerouac, we would all agree that the collector has been conned -- even if the typewriter is precisely the same model Kerouac used. We understand that there isn't something inherently valuable in the object of the typewriter itself, but in the story of the typewriter. This seems intuitive to us -- but not so in the case of painting. With paintings, the general public expects the story to be contained on the canvas, and nowhere else.

This is also, perhaps, one of the reasons we're uncomfortable with non-representational painting -- it doesn't seem to tell a story. Picture frames look like windows, and it makes sense to peer through a window and see a landscape, or a figure. Why not just make a mountain look like a mountain, and a person look like a person? What story could a painting possibly be telling when inside the frame is only splattered paint?

I myself never really understood what was all the fuss about painters like Jackson Pollock. So when I first heard that a four-year-old's paintings were being compared to his, it sounded to me like strong evidence that the emperor wears no clothes. If a four-year-old can do it, can it truly be such an earth shattering achievement? As New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman says in My Kid Could Paint That, "It's the ultimate joke: a chimp could do it, an elephant could do it. People just think you have to be crazy to pay that amount for what looks like something anybody could do." As our cameras rolled, media frenzy and feverish collectors drove Marla's prices from $250 dollars to $25,000 dollars. It seemed to me I was filming what was truly behind the perceived value of Jackson Pollock's paintings.

But a funny thing happened while I was trying to make a documentary skeptical of abstract art.

I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting. When I wasn't around, she completed remarkable canvases larger than herself, with sweeping paint splashes and elaborate flourishes. But every time I tried to film her painting, Marla was distracted or unwilling.

At first, it made sense to me that a four-year-old wouldn't slip into a creative reverie with a group of strange adults gathered around her. Was my documentary crew interrupting the very process it was supposed to be capturing? Or was something more sinister going on? And how should I depict the Olmstead family if I didn't know for sure whether Marla did the paintings? I had 100 hours of tape I needed to cull down into a 90-minute film. The inclusion of a possibly cagey facial expression, the exclusion of a peculiar off camera aside, these cuts would point my audience toward conclusions, and these conclusions would have real world consequences for the Olmsteads. What should guide my editorial decision making process? And further, after six months of visits with this little girl and her family, was I really evaluating these questions with sober journalistic detachment, or was my perspective colored by my feelings of friendship -- or, for that matter, my desire to make a dramatic movie?

The recent and unprecedented popularity of non-fiction films has led many to call this a "golden age" for documentaries. The cinema-going public has discovered that a theatrical documentary shares what we like and expect from scripted films; a three act dramatic arc and larger than life characters -- with the extra voyeuristic enjoyment of "real life." The documentary screen appears to us a lot like the picture frame must have seemed to audiences of representational paintings one hundred years ago: a window into another reality.

But is the screen really a window, and are the things it seems to show us the real world, or constructions? The more I struggled with my own "canvas," the more truthful it felt to draw attention, at least in a small way, to the act of depicting itself. To pretend My Kid Could Paint That is simply a window into the life of a family would be like pretending that a painted mountain was a mountain, and a painted figure a person.

Maybe Jackson Pollock was on to something after all.

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