The Generation of Dynamic Subjectivity: Frank O’Hara’s Interartistic Dialogue with Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting

Abstract

This essay examines how Frank O’Hara’s poetry constructs a decentralised, dynamic subjectivity through interartistic dialogue with Jackson Pollock’s avant-garde painting philosophy. The analysis is structured around two key dimensions: the deconstruction of the author’s supreme authority and the emphasis on embodied presence. Both Jackson Pollock and Frank O’Hara deconstructed artistic authority by surrendering control. Pollock relinquished control by making gravity, painting materials, and viewers as co-creators of the painting. Similarly, O’Hara destabilised poetic authority by transferring interpretive power to readers while unleashing the autonomous potential of language. This decentralised aesthetic led to the construction of dynamic subjectivity, emphasising the embodied presence. For Pollock, subjectivity emerged through the body’s dynamic negotiation with canvas. O’Hara’s embodied presence was manifested in the improvisational immediacy and sensory description, thus forming a dynamic subjectivity. Through his poetic transformation of painterly concepts, O’Hara reconstructed Pollock’s action painting aesthetics, establishing a deliberate interartistic dialogue that not only responded to postwar anxieties of subjectivity but ultimately formulated a dynamic paradigm of subjective expression.