Number 28

Introduction: It is, precisely, in the modern art gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, that Jackson Pollock’s painting, Number 28, 1950 hangs. On a wall of its own, neither too big nor too small, it would seem completely normal in relation to the art surrounding it. But the painting has an interesting quality; to some, it appears as a vague, brown, mess of paint, to others, as a mystical movement of color contained on a canvas. The techniques that Pollock utilizes to create this effect go beyond paint and splatter, he simply uses the latter two as tools to employ something bigger: time and space. To fully understand the movement of the painting, one must understand the spatial-temporal relationship in the painting. Jacques
If one were to take away the temporality, the painting vanishes with it. And only through understanding the temporality of the painting can one fully appreciate it. The painting comes in pulses; first it is black and white. It is a web. Then it all melts away and it becomes pink and red. Another second later and another world of color emerges, all the while everything that has past seems to disappear. The colors move in choreographed dance, a dance that you, the viewer, partakes in. They react to your every move, to your every step. A step back brings back the black cobwebs. A step to the front colors the painting in hues of red. This is differance in
Derrida’s differance, albeit unfathomable in itself, unravels it. By deconstructing Pollock’s painting in terms of space and time, in the same way that Derrida does to language in differance, the movement of the elements in Number 28, 1950 come to light. It does this by illuminating the connection between spatiality and temporality and their interplay. At a cursory level, the painting looks like a complex mess of paint. Applying Derrida allows us to move past that, and recognize the spatial-temporal dimension that allows every color and the brush stroke to move