Action and Affect: Ritual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s Creative Process

This article proposes to use ritual anthropology to model the creative process inmodern Western art, illustrated by the longitudinal case study of North American artistJackson Pollock. First, the article applies Alfred Gell’s model, where artists are either“passive” spectators or “active” creators of artworks, and signals the need for a more detaileddescription of the transition between these states. Drawing from the dynamics of affects, asdrivers for action, in Jeanne Favret-Saada’s ethnography of rural sorcery, the article developsthe model further to resolve this shift. This new model emphasizes that, for Pollock, artworksare used to experience a specific affect, the pursuit of which guides his creative process, bothfor individual artworks and the development of his entire body of work. The conclusionexamines alternative models from psychology, further emphasizing the centrality of affects inthe creative processes.