NARRATOR:Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class.

旁白：听一段艺术史课的讲座。

MALE PROFESSOR:OK, at the end of our last class I started to talk a little bit about a dominant movement in United States painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

男教授：好，上一节课结束时，我讲到二十世纪四十年代末和二十世纪五十年代的美国主流绘画运动。

And I said that the artists involved shared a spirit of revolt against tradition and a belief in spontaneous freedom of expression.

我讲到参与其中的艺术家都有一种反抗传统的精神，以及对自由表达的信仰。

This significant art movement is known as Abstract Expressionism.

这场重要的艺术运动叫做抽象表达主义运动。

Now, Abstract Expressionism is kind of hard to define, but it-it’s basically an attempt by the artist to convey meaning or feeling in an abstract way.

好，抽象表现主义有点难以定义，但它基本上是艺术家试图以抽象的方式传达意义或感觉。

So, the artists didn’t worry about whether they were painting familiar subject matter, like the kinds of things you’d see in the world around you.

因此艺术家们并不担心他们是否在画熟悉的主题，比如你会在你周围的世界看到的那些东西。

They’d paint... well, abstract things, on, ah, a huge canvas—which itself was a break from traditional technique.

他们在巨大的帆布上画出抽象的东西，这本身就是对传统技术的突破。

And it was common among artists to apply the paint to the canvas very rapidly and with great force.

在艺术家中，将颜料快速而有力地涂在画布上是很常见的。

So let’s look at the work of the most famous American Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock.

那么让我们来看看美国最著名的抽象表现主义画家杰克逊·波洛克 (Jackson Pollock) 的作品吧。

There was nothing in Jackson Pollock’s training as an artist that suggested he would come to be seen as some sort of artistic revolutionary.

在杰克逊·波洛克训练成为艺术家的过程中，没有任何迹象表明他会被视为某种艺术革命者。

In the 1930s he studied drawing and painting at the Art Students League, a popular art school in New York City.

二十世纪三十年代时，他在纽约市一所受欢迎的艺术学校，一个艺术学生联盟学习绘画。

What he did later—in the 1940s—was a startling innovation.

后来，到了二十世纪四十年代，他做出了惊人的创新。

Jackson Pollock used a technique, the so called “pour and drip” technique, for which he is best known.

杰克逊波洛克使用了一种技术，即所谓的倒滴技术，他最出名的是这种技术。

He didn’t use the traditional easel—he laid his wall-size canvas flat on the floor, so he could move around it and work it from all sides.

他没有使用传统的画架，而是将墙壁大小的帆布平放在地板上，这样他就可以在它周围移动并从各个方向工作。

Then he poured and dripped his paint onto the canvas without touching it with a brush—just poured and dripped.

然后他将颜料倒在画布上，滴在画布上，没有用刷子接触它，只是倒了又滴。

Now, the physical movements involved in Pollock’s painting technique have led people to call it “action painting,” which almost suggests that the process of creating the painting, physically, was at least as important as the end product itself.

波洛克绘画技术中所涉及的身体的运动，使人们将其称为“动作绘画”，这几乎意味着以这种方式创作绘画的过程至少与最终作品本身一样重要。

In fact, people used to watch him work in his studio, dripping and pouring paint and other materials onto his canvases.

事实上，人们常常看着他在他的工作室工作，将颜料和其它材料滴落和倾倒在他的画布上。

This could make you think of Pollock’s work as being kind of like, wild or chaotic, or random.

这可能会让你认为波洛克的作品有点像狂野、混乱或随机的。

But the truth is that Pollock was in complete control of his materials and his paintings.

但事实是波洛克完全控制了他的材料和他的画作。

Pollock’s pour and drip works were quite revolutionary, and at first they shocked the art world.

波洛克倾倒和滴落技术的作品也颇具革命性，在最开始时震惊了艺术界。

Pollock used massive canvases. They seem more like portable murals than anything else.

波洛克使用了大量的画布。他们看到的更像是便携式壁画而不是其他任何东西。

A good example of his technique is the painting Autumn Rhythm, which Pollock painted in 1950.

一个很好的关于他绘画技术的例子是《秋韵》，这是波洛克在二十世纪五十年代画的。

Autumn Rhythm, at first glance looks like basically, just a whole lot of squiggly lines; rather bizarre, just like a bunch of pointless drips and swirls.

《秋韵》乍看之下基本上就是一大堆曲折诡异的线条，就像一堆毫无意义的水滴和漩涡。

But if you look closely, you see why it’s so admired.

但如果你仔细观察，你就会明白为什么它如此受人钦佩。

Beneath all the apparent chaos there’s really a very definite structure of lines, rhythms, and sensations that makes the whole piece work.

在所有明显的混乱之下，确实有一个非常明确的线条、节奏和感觉的结构，使整部作品十分合理。

Sheer randomness would not be nearly as visually appealing as this painting is.

纯粹的随机绘画不会像这幅画那样具有视觉吸引力。

You need some structure, even if it’s not readily apparent.

你需要一些结构，即使它不是很明显。

I’ve read some articles by other scholars who’ve, in their discussion of Pollock, um, some of them like to point out that he painted his canvases while looking down at them, since they were on the ground, as I said, but when we go to a museum, they’re up on a wall.

我读过其他学者在讨论波洛克时的一些文章，呃，其中一些人喜欢指出他在画布上绘画时，总是低着头，因为画布在地上，就像我前面提到的，但是当我们去博物馆时，画布是挂在在墙上的。

They think this is significant because it makes our perspective different.

他们认为这很重要，因为这使我们的视角不同。

But I mean...well, think of photography.

但我的意思是，好吧，想想摄影。

We’ve all seen photos of the sky, the ground...meaning that the photographer was shooting from different angles.

我们都看过天空、地面的照片，这意味着摄影师是从不同的角度拍摄的。

Does that mean that we should put a photo of the sky, on the ceiling?Of course not.

这是否意味着我们应该在天花板上放一张天空的照片？当然不是。

It wouldn’t matter if you’re looking at it on a wall or in a photo album on your lap. And I think it’s the same with Pollock.

无论你是在墙上还是在膝上的相册中看它，都没有关系。我认为波洛克也是如此。

It doesn’t matter from which angle we view his paintings. It’s OK that he painted on the floor and we look at it on the wall.

我们从哪个角度看他的画并不重要。他在地板上画画，我们在墙上看，是没关系的。

But in spite of his work being shocking and even misunderstood at first, Pollock’s work became so influential in the development of Abstract Expressionism, that the artistic community started to shift its attention from Paris, which had been the center of the art world, to New York, where Pollock lived and worked.

但尽管他的工作令人震惊，甚至最初被误解，波洛克的作品对抽象表现主义的发展产生了如此大的影响，以至于艺术界开始将注意力从艺术界的中心巴黎转移到波洛克生活和工作的纽约。

So Pollock’s breakthrough work helped move the focus of contemporary art, and that’s one of the measures of his greatness, really.

所以波洛克的突破性作品帮助转移了当代艺术的焦点，这是衡量他伟大的标准之一，的确如此。