Painting On Into The Machine Age

'Painting After Technology' Gallery, Tate Modern, London, May 2015.  (L-R): Work By:
Laura Owens, Wade Guyton, Tomma Abts, Albert Oehlen

A few posts back, I wrote belatedly about a gallery trip to London I made earlier this year.  My goal was to visit retrospective exhibitions of work by Richard Diebenkorn and Marlene Dumas, both of which were well worth the trip.  However, with a spare hour to kill at Tate Modern, I also dipped into the latest hang of the permanent collection.  I want to consider a little of what I found there in this post.  Although it’s after-the-event, it all has some bearing on current thoughts about my own work, both recent, and to come.  Interestingly, while the main reason for my visit was to enjoy two favourite artists not directly related to my own stuff, these serendipitous discoveries actually feel surprisingly applicable to it.

Gerhard Richter, 'Cage' Paintings (L-R: '1,2,3'), Tate Modern, London, May 2015

I love such inexplicable ‘gifts’ and, whatever else the Tate may or may not be, I find it a regular source of revealing discoveries or refreshing new juxtapositions.  This is in part due to the curatorial habit of regularly shuffling and recontextualising the collection thematically rather than chronologically, seemingly to avoid standard, tired accounts of Art History.  It may also be due to fact that I visit London less regularly these days.  Several visits a year have now dwindled to one or two, and things I’ve become familiar with over the years can seem a little fresher once more.  Absence makes the heart grow stronger, perhaps.  However, the things that really caught my attention this time were mostly new to me.

Gerhard Richter, 'Cage 1', Oil On Canvas, 2006

Gerhard Richter, 'Cage 2', Oil On Canvas, 2006

I had started by heading straight for Gerhard Richter’s room of ‘Cage’ paintings.  I’ve loved this suite of six, immense, squeegee-dragged abstracts since they were installed in the wake of Richter’s large Tate retrospective in 2012.  As a visitor attraction, it may now serve a similar function to the famous ‘Rothko Room’, in the Tate’s mind, but I find rather more of interest and philosophical complexity in the Richters, these days.  Richter’s technique of repeatedly dragging his accretions of paint over and through each other is simple in essence, but highly complex in terms of outcome.  The ‘Cage’ works actually encapsulate a wealth of insight into the nature of time, process, self-reflexivity, and (of prevailing interest), the materiality of paint.  Notwithstanding his status as an established giant of international painting, he still does it for me as regards balancing Philosophy with a tireless medium.

Gerhard Richter, 'Cage 4', Oil On Canvas, 2006

Gerhard Richter, 'Cage 6', Oil On Canvas, 2006

In an adjacent gallery, entitled ‘Torn Papers And Walls Paper’, I discovered a newly hung trio of pieces of direct relevance to my own recent concerns.  Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘Walls Paper’ commemorates a more extensive installation of 1972, comprising an entire wall, papered with printed, manipulated photos of part-demolished New York project buildings.  Whilst its near-abstract qualities are engaging in their own right, the piece also appears to engage with issues of architectural transformation and the inadequacy of affordable housing provision.  Covering the walls with repeated images like this suggests both the compartmentalisation of low-rent accommodation, and the pasting of fly-posters within an urban environment.

Gordon Matta-Clark, 'Walls Paper', Printed Paper, Original Installation At David Zwimer Gallery,
New York, 1972

Of even more immediate impact was Jacques Villeglé’s ‘Jazzmen’.  I already knew this piece, as one of his classic found-poster ‘Affiches Lacérées’, but it works particularly well conceptually, in its present company.  Simply re-exhibiting a battered section of advertising material may seem a fairly facile strategy these days, (albeit one that appeals greatly in its directness), but back in 1961 it had considerable radical currency and is clearly in the Duchampian tradition of the ‘Readymade’.  The activities of Villeglé and his fellow ‘Nouveaux Realistes’ appear to antecede and coincide with certain Situationist ideas, not least in their conception of the streets as an arena of self-generating images, texts and potential detournements.  No prizes for guessing why I’m always happy to see this work.

Jacques Mahe De La Villegle, 'Jazzmen', Printed Paper On Canvas, 1961

Mark Bradford, 'Riding The Cut Vein', Paper, Varnish, Silicone, Caulk & Charcoal On Canvas, 2013

The third piece in that gallery, and one of particular relevance to my own recent output, is Mark Bradford’s ‘Riding The Cut Vein’ from 2013.  It’s another mural-sized piece, of incredible intricacy, also constructed from layered posters, (heavily manipulated and abraded, this time).  Appearing initially abstract, the loose, mesh-like geometry extending across its upper portion soon reveals itself as a form of notional, street map.  That is carved into an indescribably nuanced surface, created by employing power tools to sand and grind back through the accumulated paper strata.  The process reveals a dazzling array of colours, patterns and text fragments, like a field of granular micro-clues.  Naturally, all this speaks loudly to my own recent concerns with urban cartography, found texts and hybrid poster-collage.  Spookily coincidental though it may seem, I’d never even heard of Bradford prior to this encounter, (honest, Guv.).  A little Googling suggests I’ll be investigating his oeuvre a lot more in the future.

Mark Bradford, 'Riding The Cut Vein', 2013,  (Detail)

Mark Bradford, 'Untitled', Manipulated & Collaged Posters On Canvas, 2009

If that little room detained me for several enjoyable minutes, I gained even greater stimulation from the larger gallery immediately beyond.  Gathered under the banner of ‘Painting After Technology’, this new hang showcases a selection of big (and big-ish) names in the field of contemporary or near-contemporary Art.  Amongst these, were interesting pieces by Tomma Abts, Charline Von Heyl, Laura Owens, Jacqueline Humphries, Wade Guyton, Sigmar Polke, and, especially pleasingly, Christopher Wool and Albert Oehlen.  Fairly obviously, all can be said to make some specific reference to the relationship between traditional and ‘new’ (be that digital or mechanically reproduced) media [1.].  Polke is, I suppose, the granddaddy here, consciously looking back to the layered halftone, found imagery of Pop Art, as he does.  Along with several others here, he also emphasises the importance of German painting in recent decades.  In that context, (and thinking of daft, old George Baselitz), is it also worth noting how many of these notable artists are women?).

Sigmar Polke, 'Untitled (Square 2)', Oil, Acrylic & Gold Paint On Canvas, 2003

I’ve been thinking about those media relationships a lot recently, whilst the work of both Wool and Oehlen in particular, are recent enthusiasms of mine, without my having actually seen any for real previously.  I initially came to Wool through his ironic, monochrome text paintings, but the large ‘Untitled’ canvas of 2007, represents a looser, more recent mode of wiped, abstraction.  It’s impossible not to find some memory of graffiti in the calligraphic elements, but these paintings are as much about the accumulation of fluid marks through repeated erasures and cancellations.  Wool’s gestural turps-wipes into thinly painted statements, leave a history of swipes, drips, ghost marks, veils and general nuance.  The results are confident in scale, but remain pleasingly nebulous and transitory in overall effect.  They speak of the movement of a human hand, the fluid plasticity of paint, the implied accretion of grime and incoherent texts in city streets, and the ceaseless cycles of statement, partial cancellation and restatement, (ad infinitum), that characterise Wool’s urban context.

Christopher Wool, 'Untitled', Enamel On Canvas, 2007

Were this all that Wool offered, it would be plenty, - but essentially just another iteration of traditional painterly abstraction.  However, as the augmented screen print, ('Untitled', 2009), hanging alongside reveals, Wool’s overall process is one in in which a wide variety of visual statements (and application methods) are endlessly recycled, repurposed and reproduced through photography and print media as well as paint.  Ultimately, nothing feels like a definitive statement, but rather just the latest image in an endless reverie of grimy city streets.  It feels like everything informs everything else, and even the overriding tendency towards abstraction is modified by the significant role of Wool’s bleakly atmospheric documentary photographs in the overall scheme.

Christopher Wool, 'Untitled', Enamel On Screen Print On Paper, 2009

Christopher Wool, 'Absent Without Leave', Photocopied Photograph (Part Of Artist's Book), 1993

Oehlen is another well-established artist who nevertheless sees to occupy a position of continuing relevance (or something to do with what is often called ‘Zeitgeist’).  Earlier work seems to belong to a mode of deliberately awkward German daubing that does relatively little for, but although it’s difficult not to admire the sheer bloody-minded will to stir things up that it implies.  2007’s ‘Loa’, however, represents a more multi-layered mode of combining elements of collaged promotional material with almost arbitrary instances of smeared or sprayed paint and textual references to contemporary music.

Albert Oehlen, 'Loa', Acrylic, Oil, Ink, Spray Paint, Photograph & Paper Collage On Canvas

There’s often a slightly slap-dash, even unfocussed quality about much of this, almost as if Oehlen was drawing upon a grab bag of contemporary stimuli whilst partially distracted.  It’s the kind of thing one might even imagine being made whilst simultaneously watching TV or checking their phone.  And yet, is this not actually highly representative of our current, attention-deficient cultural consciousness?  In fact, there is some variety of awkward formal coherence about much of Oehlen’s work, but one that appears to emerge, as if by accident, through the eventual condensation of suspiciously aimless statements. 

Albert Oehlen, 'Untitled', Oil & Ink On Canvas, 2007

That’s also there in his linear 'Computer Paintings', to some extent.  They could be dismissed as resembling those potentially endless free doodles we all practiced the first time we encountered a PC mouse, but further examination reveals they are actually rather more knowingly constructed.  The combination of free, directly drawn statements, with more deliberately filtered effects of pixilation, or pattern-generation, clearly exploit certain effects intrinsic to the medium.  Intriguingly, they also indicate that it has long-since acquired a kind of recognisable ‘tradition’.

If encountering Wool and Oehlen provided my biggest single excitements, there was much else in the gallery to engage me and provoke thought.  Wade Guyton’s large-scale ink jet print, ‘Untitled’ (2011), exhibits an abstract minimalism that feels distinctly Modernist. However the apparent attempt to print a solid block of ink are full of banding, glitches, accidental marks and empty areas, undermining any sense of seamless mechanical perfection or even, adequate manufacture.  It’s probably no accident that the two halves appear actually seamed together.

Wade Guyton, 'Untitled', Inkjet Print On Linen, 2011

Of all the pieces in the room, Tomma Abt’s thoughtful, little quasi-Op painting, ‘Zebe’, from 2010, stood out for its characteristic modest scale.  It might be possible to make some case for this piece representing the importance of craft, in contrast to the deliberate superficiality, or even vacuity, of certain pieces surrounding it [2.]. Paradoxically though, this tendency towards insubstantiality, or a kind of ungroundedness, feels like one of the qualities that most links much of that work with its particular moment.  It feels less like a problem, once it becomes something perfectly worthy of exploration. [3.]. 

Tomma Abts, 'Zebe', Acrylic & Oil On Canvas, 2010

It may be that, as usual, I’m a decade behind everyone else, but it definitely feels like there are implications, in much of this work, that could usefully inform my own.  Whatever the future holds, there’s little to suggest that our collective perceptions won’t continue to be transformed by advancing digital technology.  This is probably equally true, regardless of whether one actually employs it as a means of production, or simply lets it inform a kind of surface-slide, aesthetically.  One question is, I suppose, to what extent we choose to be shaped by it; to embrace it imaginatively; or to actively push back against any sense of deterministic impotence.

My own feeling is that, as ever, it’s all up for grabs really.  I suspect, someone is already writing an algorithm to simulate the kind of intuitive thought characteristic of painting, but that it may still look (interestingly) more like itself than ‘actual’ painting.  I also trust that artists will still find ways to corrupt any code, on an arbitrary whim, for a little longer yet.  Perhaps, in the long run, some recourse to authenticity, and/or an attitude of subversive adoption, will co-exist as superficially opposed, but equally useful, ways to chart the course ahead.

[1.]:  Dan Perfect would be another artist, with whose work I have become acquainted in the last year or two, and who seems to engage with various, related issues.  Certainly, a process of digital translation appears to unmistakably alter the final appearance of his painting.

[2.]:  There is, indeed, an actual vacancy of ill-resolved paint at the very heart of Oehlen’s ‘Loa’. 

[3.]:  I have heard it claimed that many newer artists now crave a greater sense of authenticity, and even, laughably, that ‘Authenticity’ is now ‘in’, (think about it).