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).

You Know What Thinking Did...

Here’s an attempt to detail something of the tangled internal monologue over my work mentioned in my last post.  Forgive the length and style of this one, - the form reflects something of the mental over-activity that has sometimes halted my creative workflow.  I emphasise the past tense there because the whole point of this is to demonstrate that ‘I don’t do that any more’.  This is an initial splurge but I intend to keep breaking these issues into manageable chunks and keep working in the expectation that various issues will find resolution in the paintings in their own time time.

Jaques Villegle & Raymond Hains, 'Ach Alma Manetro, '
Torn Poster Collage, 1949

I recently read a book called ‘Art, Word & Image – 2000 Years of Visual/Textual Interraction’ [1.] and for the first time really started to appreciate the linkages between Cubism Dada Surrealism Post War radical movements including Letterism Nouveau Realism and Situationism through to Pop Art and Conceptualism and more recent phenomena like Punk aesthetics and Street Art and my eye was caught by the work of Jacques Villegle and also of Raymond Hains and Mimmo Rotella ...

Raymond Hains, 'Sans Titre', Torn Poster Collage,  1998

Mimmo Rotella, ' With a Smile', Torn Poster Collage, 1962

...who all worked with torn posters which chimed with my own fascination for them and numerous photos I’ve taken of the subject including my images of tattered hoardings at New Year and the amalgamation of reclaimed posters into my own recent paintings and also how my house is currently full of coloured billboard tatters collected on recent local forays and that I hope to use in collages somehow plus I also thought about how those artists drew on Duchamp’s Dadaist tradition of the Readymade and employed a rip and paste approach to text and image fragments to subvert standard meanings or invent new ones randomly and to regard the city street as a valid arena for expression in its own right and thus to look back to ideas of the urban flaneur and forward to the theories of the Situationist International whilst retaining a distinct Pop flavour and also about a  contemporary Street Artist called Vhills/Alexandre Farto who I became aware of a while back who’ s also done some striking work with torn posters...

Alexandre Farto, Billboard Collage, 2008

Alexandre Farto, 'Compro Logo Existo', Torn Poster Collage

...and suddenly I felt that my own things are quite polite and limited in scope in comparison being essentially about the street rather of it and quite quickly I’ve found that my researches have led me to investigate the theories of Guy Debord and The Situationist International whose ideas about textual manipulation developed the word-games of Surrealism and the Letterists into the still-common subversive strategy of Detournement and who also embraced the notion of the Derive as an aimless but observational urban wandering to propose a formal urban psychogeography...

Guy Debord (With Glasses at Head of Table) & Members
of the Situationist International, Gothenburg, 1961

Situationist Derive Map of Paris

...where different quarters and zones might be defined by mood atmosphere or subjective response in reaction to the alienation and boredom that result from the imperatives of bureaucratic authority and capitalist economics and this made me recognise how these slightly barmy notions actually reflect something of my own responses to the environment I inhabit and just how important a sense of place has always been to me both in my work and my life but how so far I’ve usually regarded it in a largely personal context like when I haunt specific hometown locations significant to my personal history whereas Situationism became ever more politicised and arrived at a form of Post Marxist Geography that inevitably degenerated into the self-defeating theoretical dead ends and pedantic infighting typical of all self proclaimed revolutionary movements notwithstanding some really interesting ideas about the spectacular but ultimately alienated nature of modern societies and the fact it became a significant contributor to the radical uprisings in Paris in 1968 not least in the use of provocative if obscure graffiti slogans and a strong sense of the street as territory reclaimed through staged actions...

Paris 1968

'Society is an Carnivorous Flower'

'Beneath The Pavement, The Beach'

...which all seems quite apposite just now because its possible to see how these ideas about urban space permitted access and territorial control all feed into contemporary phenomena like the anti-capitalist Occupy movement and the 2011 riots and the multiple ways in which private or government interests seek to annexe public spaces or deny access in the name of security or direct our movements through increasingly controlled permitted channels or exert social control through housing policy or simply price the poor out of neighbourhoods or redevelop well established areas of cities with questionable effects or create magnificent palaces of leisure and consumerism or use economic drivers to shape population distribution or even how the plethora of textual interventions in our streets cover the whole gamut from the strictly authoritarian and utilitarian through the commercial to the strategically subversive and just plain criminal...

...and I realise I’m increasingly attuned to all this as I traverse my own city and observe the rapid changes its going through and the constant tension between decay and renewal revealed in its physical surfaces not to mention the transformations that Britain has undergone in my own lifetime sometimes for the better but sometimes also in an alienating way and making those connections really was exhilarating and there’s no denying that distinct elements of all this have been creeping into my work of late but in ways that again seem a bit superficial and it raises loads of questions about how I want to order and prioritise it all in terms of the visual/observational versus the textual/conceptual and if it's preferable to maintain a detached philosophical stance or risk straying into political engagement or whether art is most like itself when it just seeks to witness and reflect the visual world which may well include multiple clues to all of the above whilst resisting any particular position on it because I can never get away from my deep engagement with the visual as primary stimulus.

Belgrave Gate, Leicester, 2009

...and by the way see paintings as so much more than just culturally obsolete tradable product and anyway these radical cultural movements always seem to conclude that no pre-existing art form can be tolerated just violent gesture or politically correct strategy and everything else must be subsumed in anarchistic nihilism and perpetual revolution despite the fact that they all end up in museums and books and academic curricula just like everything else and this is certainly true of the Parisian student uprisings of 1968 and the Punk movement both of which are now memorialised and periodically rehashed...

...whilst street art readily creeps into galleries and fills numerous glossy books and even Situationism itself could simply be seen as the last gasp of the twentieth century Avant Garde and in passing I wonder why I wasn’t more aware of Situationism years ago given that my teenage years coincided with the relatively brief moment of Punk...

...so returning to my work I oscillate between the feeling that creative practice carried out in our period of historical crises should attempt to incorporate something of this radical tradition even though it moved past painting long ago and probably reflects a political sensibility that has more to do with the last century than the current situation and the feeling that by now we’ve surely outgrown the idea that paintings can only be tradable artefacts of a spectacular society and I wonder if actually I should permit myself a much wider remit that with Gerhard Richter's admirable stance of engaged neutrality in mind permits more open-ended responses to the relationship between text and the urban environment within an overarching psychogeographical umbrella...

Leicester, 2012

...and that has made me go back to re-read Merlin Coverly’s excellent survey of the subject [2.] but mostly I agonise over how to encompass some of all this without resorting to trite or obvious clichés or over simplistic signifiers to which I fear I can be too subject or indeed how to find my own voice within it all rather than just travelling already well trodden paths and at this point I can almost hear you shouting JUST SHUT UP YOU’LL NEVER GET ANYWHERE IF YOU DON’T STOP OVER ANALYSING EVERYTHING!

I don’t necessarily expect you to have read all the way through that but I do feel better for putting it down.  It does seem that one of the functions of a blog is to externalise things that might otherwise remain as mental barriers to creativity.  It’s likely I’ll return to these themes in future posts in which case I’ll attempt to exert more order over my writings as well as my thought processes.

[1.]:  John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas & Michael Corris, 'Art, Word & Image - 2000 Years of Visual/Textual Interraction', London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010

[2.]:  Merlin Coverly, 'Psychogeography', Harpenden UK, Pocket Essentials, 2010

Other Sources:

Guy Debord, 'Why Lettrism?', Paris, Potlach No. 22, 1955

Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography', Brussels, Les Levres Nues, 1955

Guy Debord, 'The Society of the Spectacle', 1967, Trans. Ken Knabb, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/

Ken Knabb, 'Situationist International Anthology', Berkeley CA., Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006

Marco Livingstone, 'Pop Art - A Continuing History', London, Thames & Hudson, 1990 

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/

Art, Word And Image: Stuart Davis & Jacques Villegle

Currently, I'm reading a book called ‘Art, Word and Image – Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interraction’ by John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas and Michael Corris. [1.]  It’s an interesting chronological overview of the subject in three sections, each featuring an historical survey by one of the three named authors and subsidiary essays by various other writers.  The first spans a massive period from the earliest civilisations to 1900, in a selective skim over the centuries.  However, the second section - devoted to early 20^th Century Modernism, and the third – covering the post war to present day period, are more satisfying.

 Amongst the artists discussed, are two that I’ve been aware of for ages without studying in any depth – namely Stuart Davis and Jacques Villegle.  Lots of artists hover in the background of my knowledge like that until something intensifies my curiosity.  As both of these have produced work that could be related to aspects of my own I should get my finger out and explore it in more depth.  Meanwhile, here's an opportunity to show examples of their stuff and offer my, (admittedly superficial), first impressions.

Stuart Davis, 'The Mellow Pad', Oil on Canvas, 1941-51

Jacques Villegle, '50, Rue Turbigo, 10 Jan',  Torn Paper Posters, 1977

Initially, one might dismiss Stuart Davis’s work for resembling a rather facile style of funky graphics typical of jazz-funk or ska-pop records from the early 1980s.  However, their dates reveal Davis as a much earlier, forward thinking link between European cubism, (Juan Gris and Fernand Leger for instance) and American Pop Art.  That Davis was active on the political Left suggests these images may be more than just a cheerful hurrah for the pop culture of post-war America.

Fernand Leger, 'The City', Oil on Canvas, 1919

Juan Gris 'Violin and Playing Cards', 
Oil on Canvas, 1913

Stuart Davis, 'Percolator', Oil on Canvas, 1927

Stuart Davis, 'Owh! in San Pao', Oil on Canvas, 1951

Stuart Davis, 'Visa', Oil on Canvas, 1951

Stuart Davis, 'Rapt at Rappaport's', Oil on Canvas, 1952

Stuart Davis, 'Something on the Eight Ball', Oil on Canvas, 1953-54

Jacques Villegle fits into the context of the post-war European Avant-garde and would appear to be an important figure within the tradition of collage.  An interest in commercial posters isn’t so radical today but Villegle’s use of actual torn posters as raw materials dates back to the late 1940s.  These pieces are both from the street and of the street and would seem to point toward the Situationists and beyond to more recent critical responses to modern consumer society.  

Jacques Villegle, 'Blue O Noir',  Torn Paper Posters, 1955

Jacques Villegle, 'Jazzmen',  Torn Paper Posters, 1961

Jacques Villegle, 'Boulevard Bourdon 11 January',Torn Paper Posters, 1965

Jacques Villegle, '122 Rue Du Temple',  Torn Paper Posters, 1968

Jacques Villegle, 'Clermont Ferrand',Torn Paper Posters, 2000

One other thing about these paintings, - they’re all rather beautiful, (for those of us who still care about that kind of thing).

[1.]:  John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas & Michael Corris, ‘Art, Word and Image – Two Thousand Years of Visual/Textual Interraction’, London, Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010