Abstract
Moving from Mao’s wild calligraphy that runs off the page and on to Jackson Pollock’s paintings that run off the canvas, the chapter examines how their trails, while intertwined in terms of energy, nevertheless lead to two different “states of becoming.” If Pollock’s work runs off the canvas and into Kaprow’s Happenings, it enters life by producing a “distanciation” effect in relation to the everyday. Maoism would work differently. Gathering all thought under the rubric of class struggle, the Maoist one big concept relied on repeated and all-enveloping political campaigns that would then fuel the movement toward political intensity. In both Mao and Pollock, however, we can see work driven by affective energy releases.