Amoungst the madness and the mayhem was the glance,
Within the order of the daily was a chance
Encounter with a moment which broke routine,
Of a sight were not shown but now have seen.
Without the theatre there is not the long applause,
But thats it’s nature; the silence of the unstaged pause.
Andy, these are a real success. It is hard to judge them in relation to the majority of your other work as they stand alone. They don’t seem to fit directly into the your main line of progress. In this sense they are like the two portraits you did, in that they have more autonomy as ‘products’.
This si not to say I don’t see link with your other work. It is also not suggesting I see the rest of your practise as homogenous in type or function. It is just these two feel like a necessary deviation.
The interplay of your paintings to original photographic sources is a continuous aspect of your work. But the more direct transaltion evident in the above work creates far more singuarly mimetic problems.
Without wishing to dillute subtleties it obviously pushes this into a realm which we might call more ‘traditional’ forms of landscape picture making. Obviously the relation to photogrepahy as a medium between cavnas and land renders it into a more specific field of associations.
This sounds like waffle but it is a preamble to explain why i think this means you have a different sets of problems to deal with here. On the one hand certain narrative and analytic complexities have been removed. But in reducing your challneges down it is obvioulsy far more easy to move towards the pictureque, the pretty, the vacuous. You have not done this.
What raises this picture above that is a few things. Firstly I think the sourcing of the source material has a certain rightness. It has been found not searched for. It has forced itself upon you. It is close to being fairly conventional but the angle and compostion create a tension, that kind of throwaway snapshot which has the sense of the contemplative. The unstaged pause if you like. I think this is really hard to find.
Beyond this thought its greatest strength is in the technical merit of the painting. You have surpassed yourself. There are patches in many of your previous works which have left me jealous and delighted. The green in ‘Charity’, some of the glazing in ‘The Bankers’ (III I think), aspects of the flesh in your two portraits of your Aunt and Gran, the colour in ‘The Kiss’ (if the names right) etc etc. Yet this has total balance. Tihs works all over and has a sophisitication that I think, on first glance at a digital image, goes beyond any of them. This has surely come from the reduction of your problems, as well I am sure from the new paths opened up by the spray gun.
Anyway: you seem to show control of surface and cololur and a new range of tone perhaps not apparnt in most of your other work.
I think this work has a quiet poetry to it. The addition of the ballons is, of course, in danger of being cliched, but the formal plays seem to ensure this is avoided. Its a really tender painting. I love it.
What is interesting is then viewing the ’sketch’ below. I think this is starts to sit itself on a boundary which I know many of the artists you like position themselves on. That kind of Hodgkin desire for the sophisitication of the crude mark.
Some of the passages of paint have a wonderful duality. They are so clearly just bits of paint hastily whacked onto a piece of paper. Yet then they are also so effective in fulfilling their mimetic role of describing landscape; to the point that there could almost be a photographic feel to parts. Photographic in terms of that kind of casual shot out of a train. I want to see this one in the flesh in the hope it does not disapoint me. I know the other one won’t.
I want to be more constructive and temper my praise with criticism. The only thing I can think to criticise is that perhaps the lack of much to criticise shows the pictures up for having less to tackle and deconstruct than many of your others. I have no idea if this is a bad thing.
What I do know is that I am excited to see how some of the lessons (if thats the correct word) from these works transfer into your next body of images. When more layers of meaning and complexity are added back in, will the painterly qualities of these images survive.
Thinking here about your mini essay on post-modernism tom. It strikes me that Robert Rauschenberg really is one of the truly significant post-modern practitioners, and that I need to read so much more on him. Its bizarre, he put together collages of random objects, and stated that he didn’t look for any meaning in what he placed together, but that the viewer would find his own lyrical connections, how the hell is this good, how the hell is it art, but yet it is!! its the true avant garde, precisely because its rough, uncompromising and relentlessly indefatiguable(?!?).
the need for a return to craft- craft as art/art as craft/craft in art.
This is a potentially misleading opinion and you was right to immediately place the idea under scrutiny. The great painter of the present will incorporate a range of techniques to produce his/her work, dipping into a wide range of contrasting subjects found in both high and low culture, juxtaposing these often in the same work. Indeed, one of the catch phrases that can be most commonly applied to post-modernity is disharmony. How one object seems to not quite fit reasonably with another, causing a friction. Of course these frictions have been played out since painting began, think of the simplified colour and form exercises in abstraction, look at earlier scene paintings and you will see the same abstract awareness of form and colour, then think of lyrical associations that contradict the overall aesthetic, Titians wonderful little dog in the flaying of Marsyas is a good example. The art of making a painting balance is tricky enough, but the greatest artists have always seemed to add the tension of disharmony into the mix. So how is this Post-modern disharmony different? To say it is self conscious (one of the most common descriptions for Post-modernism) would be wrong, this effect has always been consciously sought after. Perhaps it is better to say it is more sought after. The line with which painters in history dared not cross, which would in essence make the visual enjoyment of the picture disappear has been drastically moved, that is to say, it has always been moving, but with the advent particularly of Manet, Cezanne and then Cubism, along with the publics gradual acceptance and now love of these works, we are able to break our images apart even more than ever. Because of this, a whole range of analogical meanings can be expressed more deliberately than ever before within the breaking apart of a pictures harmony.
I am digressing, so I’ll return to the original point of craft in work. It is a dangerous point to make because it can become easily misconstrued that craft can be art, and it becomes even more dangerous when we take into context the post-modern/duchampian idea that anything can be art. So how do we make a defined, reasoned explanation that craft is not art? Just in the same way that not all painting can automatically be called art just because it is a painting; I suppose it comes down to the nature of why the work was produced -it has to be socially and artistically self-aware- is the outcome at once present and eternal? The difficulty is that, when producing a painting, to be too ‘aware’ is to place the idea before the deed, and this outcome can only produce bad painting. There is no easy answer, but an artists day-to-day concerns must feel present within the work. This means that a painting of some nice mountains in Wales does not constitute Art although it may be a very nice painting, but if the paint is handled in some particular way or an object is placed in the landscape which results in a cutting lyricism then the image may indeed be Art.
So, I move onto the Peter Doig show that is currently on in London (until end of April 2008) and the issue of craft and art raises its ugly head again. There is no doubt in my mind that the show I witnessed was produced by a supreme master of the medium in question. He really knows paint. And equally there were some singular works which stand out as being profoundly emotive pieces, so why, on the whole, did I leave feeling slightly cold? The answer is a fairly simple one, his oeuvre is just a bit too easy, I didn’t feel like I came out of the show having seriously questioned anything about myself or the world, I didn’t feel different at all. And this harks back to the fact that his paintings give you what you want, there isn’t enough tension within them. There’s visual tension, of the formal variety, but there was no tension in the subject, and if you’re gonna produce figurative works, you’ve got to include both in order to be seen as a great artist. It is common place to advertise the outsider-ness of an artist, and Doigs retrospective certainly didn’t disappoint, there has been reams of writing on how he bucked the trend of the yBa’s, producing painting when there was no excitement surrounding it, the fact of the matter is, people never stopped painting, they just didn’t get famous for doing it. Living in Trinidad, a true outsider, his works speak directly of this. The single figure in splendid isolation. They’d become almost like a sad cliche if it wasn’t for his painterly excellence, of which he really does excel at.
Francis Bacon “Portrait of Lucian Freud” 1965
“The entire series of spasms in Bacon is of this type: scenes of love, of vomitin and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs to rejoin the field of the material structure…and the scream, Bacon’s scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth”
What Deleuze is talking about, I think, is the finding of the figure rather than the figurative. Its about finding the essence of his protagonists physicality, not its appearance. Its an excavation of the aesthetic which evokes rather than describes. The physical sensation visualised not the from mirrored. I suppose there is a link here to the more psychological peeling back of the skin performed by Bacon’s contemporary, Lucian Freud.
Deleuze goes on to say: “The heads are all prepared to receive these deformations (hence the wiped, scrubbed, or rubbed out zones in the portraits of heads)”
Its as if Bacon’s consciously abstract and shifts his visual in order to refind a pure form. Its that constant search for the reinvention of realism.
I am currently working on five largish paintings at the same time. They were started within a few days of each other but the three I have uploaded are the closest to completion. ‘The swimmer’ (left) might be finished) ‘The Pink Lady and the Faller’ (central) still needs some work on a few specific areas and the ‘Horse Between somewhere and Nowhere’ could be very close to finish or quite a way off.
I deny happy accidents. Nothing is accidental in painting.
We make choice, conscious ones. We sleect which pigments to mix together. We choose the ratio of pigment to a particular medium. We choose a way to apply this mixture and the surface we apply it too. We then choose how to move this around the surface. After this comes the choose of the next step. What parts to remove, which to leave, which to protect, which to work over, which to scrap back. Each of these choices then invovles a range of descisions over the manner in which to take that next step.
Painting is just a sereis of journeys. Just because we are not working towards preconcevied end points it does not mean we have no control over our destination.
We discover things we would never have consciously thought about. But we then consciously deside if we are to reside in the place, to rest there, to move on, to forget about it, to celebrate it, to focus on it or ignore it.
The accident does not exist.
The romantic and the cynic are good bed fellows. They understand that they only exist because of the other one. That seems, to both of them anyway, a good basis for a lasting relationship. Since the destruction of clear hierarchies in relationships they have been able to exist in a more openly, flexible and harmonious union. They fluctuate between positions of power, aware that such a thing does exist and denial of it is pointless.
It just rots and it just blooms.
The cynic is all logic, all common sense and lives in reality. The romantic is aware of the false nature of reality, so fails to believe in it. Instead he idealises, dreaming of transcendence, a lose of transience and the eternal. The cynic suitably tempers this, pointing out the fleeting nature of any such experiences. Rather than dampen his enthusiasm it provides a new sense of relative pleasure to the romantic. The cynic is given occasional wings by the romantic, which stop him gravitating inside himself.
It never stops as it never ends.
The cynic shows him the wall which needs to exist in order for his windows to hold up. The romantic creates the windows which the cynic would not believe in. Architecturally they support each other. It’s a happy union which could last forever. It’s a happy union until it ends.
It only rises if it falls.
It resonates on the tracks, a shake of the hips sideways as we shuttle forwards. My heart (my actual heart, not that poetic metaphor of love based issues) feels cloying. My awareness of its existence beneath my breast bring a paranoia of clogging tubes.
Two stops till London Marleybone, Prince Risbourgh passed; one of those places that I am not certain exists.
They chatter, those women. Three on the four seated table. The laptop man locked beneath natter. He seemed nice when asking me to keep an eye on his laptop whilst he went to, presumably, the loo. I presume the loo because there was no food and drinks cabin; and there can’t be any other reason to get out your seat.
“Grand National’s on…that Catherine woman, the comedian, is in the new Doctor who…I watch it whilst ironing…you’d be good at the bit on entertainment”
Approaching Hgh Wycombe now. Change here for links to places, names escape me. The ladies wonder about earliness. Another mentions the expense of something.
Deleuze is certainly right about Bacon, even if I don’t know what he means.
The lime green is great.
Postmodernism.
As Dick Hebdige pointed out (“A report from the Western Front: Postmodernism and the ‘politics’ of style” 1986-87) Postmodernism has become a catch all term capable of being appropriated to describe an almost limitless range of things. We apply the phrase to the styled approach of contemporary painting, the design of a building, sampling and scratching in music, 9/11, the nature and development of technologies such as television and the internet, the manner in which a text is deconstructed, the interdisciplinary approach of new University courses, the destabilising of subject matter, the lose of subject, the implosion of meaning, the apocalyptic paranoia of a generation of post war baby boomers, the collapse (semi collapse) of sociological hierarchies, the lose of structure, the flattening of the political landscape, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the lose of place, responses to Einstein’s theories of relativity, the quotative and pastiche, the non existence of history and seemingly anything to which in contemporary culture which is mildly ironic. At worst it is meaningless, at best utterly confusing in its complexity. Despite this it continues to be the word of choice for many commentators looking to tie down something intangible about the present.
By its nature Postmodenrism is obviously defined by modernism. This throws up certain complexities in itself. In art historical terms alone modernism is a dichotomy. On the one hand it refers to Greenbergian notions of art for arts sake, of the closed door on association and an entirely formal, Kantian mode of meaning. On the other it has a Bauddelairian history, referring to the notion that art should celebrate the heroism of modern life, a realism explicitly about the here and now in which the work is produced.
Despite these contradictions it is possible to notice common trends across all disciplines in terms of the modern condition and the values it celebrates. It is a condition for absolute values, for the singular belief which needs to be empirically measurable and preferably tangible. It craves certainty as a notion of understanding. It allows for shifts in beliefs systems, such as the destruction of religions overbearing power, but insists on new systems to replace the old. Thus we end up with capitalism, in the West at least, which put economic structures as a mode to judge relative value. It fights for reason, certainty, progress and the new. It is a way of thinking which is capable of justifying the barbaric, reasonless, mass murder; and its manner, of the First World War battle fields. (As such Dada reaction to WW1 with its focus on irrationality can be seen as the early seeds of post-modern thought)
Modernism articulates linear progression, vertical hierarchies; singular centres and sees time as a horizontal line moving forwards and upwards. It is seen in the clear ordering of history in museums, denying the reality of the past as a mass of atoms lost in chaotic confusion. It looks to give this, and everything, the same definable and measurable coordinates that it presumes physical space has. It gives things values which can be ordered, such as ascribing notions of greatness to artists who we place into a Canon.
Postmodernism is thus the shift from this safe ground, which for ease of analysis we should falsely see as homogenous. We can loosely, although inaccurately, locate this shift as a result of tensions and rumblings in the 1950’s and 60’s. Think
The foundation of the above occurrences provides a platform from which to undermine the singularity and uncertainty of much modernist thought. New approaches demanded an inquisition. ‘Feminism’ challenged the gender biases of the west. Non western approaches showed up the ludicrous imperialistic values which form simplistic and western cantered binary oppositions such as the civilised vs the primitive. Our place as the forward thinking, monarchal power above the backward and basic ‘other’ was attacked. Marxist approaches called into question the bourgeoisie’s position of power which created repetitive social structures of separation and status. New historians highlighted the artificial nature of linear and logical historical systems. The falsity and constructed nature of our reality was revealed.
Previously many disciplines had attempted to exist in isolation, celebrating their own uniqueness. The associations between each discipline and of each to wider values was denied, suddenly we were demanded to open the door for cross disciplinary discussion. The hierarchy, isolation and value systems of every facet of existence had been fractured to the point of bankruptcy. A paradigm shift was demanded. A multicentred reality was created. The post-modern era had arrived.
The implosion of our values has led to a position where anything goes, where new means of production and consumption are demanded. It embraces the constant evolution of new media. It promotes a knowing pastiche, a subversion of types, a quotation of what has gone before, a denial of originality, the death of the author, the denial of meaning. Irony, humour are too the fore.
Movements, schools and styles are a thing of the past, to an extent. A painter might perhaps have a closer link to a scientist or musician than another painter. Our field of reference and influence is democratised, all barriers have been dissolved. All logical structures are eroded.
Freedom is a strange thing. Without the past frameworks we can feel lost. When we can do anything, in any way, about anything than a ironic creative paralysis runs through our veins. Instead of having found a utopian liberty we are actually lost, maples; floating in unknowingness. Fundamentally this is where we are today. Lost and grappling for something to trust and believe in, aware how flawed a desire that is. We know we need rules and structure else we dissolve into nothingness. Equally, how can one be set free when there is no longer a controlling devise to be set free from. Totally freedom suffocates.
It is also worth mentioning Gerhard Richter here, a most eloquent and intellectual of minds. The postmodern human arrogantly dismisses ideologies. He speaks of some idealistic ultra democratic process. Yet having or wanting no ideology is an ideology in itself. This is suitable paradoxical.
It passes, and then it’s gone. A bank of green and a timed strip of darkness replace it. It; well it had been stretched out and held in place; slightly longer than the stuff just in front of the horizontal sheet of glass.
Beyond chatter and flickering reflections nothing stopped me from diving in.
I am blinded by the glare. I think she is too.
Broken white splotches across the green expanse. The later is winning over due to the vast blue above.
No more falling now.
Three sheep, or maybe more, remind us that its actually spring. The trees are like melodies decorating this continuous vibrating rhythm. Its like an orchestral frieze. Fleeting, and urnless.
We will never meet again.
Now we are slowing. Then we are stopping. The cars await those who leave.
