Painter
Painter
Walker
Art Center
Minneapolis, Minnesota
02 Feb – 27 Oct, 2013
Part 2: Context and Dialogue
Painter Painter has the potential of being both theoretically progressive and
informative in terms of content (the works and artists displayed), and I was
privileged to be attendance as Michelle Grabner, Jan Verwoert and Bruce Hainley led participating artists
and the Center’s members in presentations and group discussion of the meaning
behind the show. (The following are
excerpts and are incomplete and subjective, but these are the notes I was able
to take and my best attempt at reconstitution.
The videos will be available at a future date from the Walker.)
The context and dialogue of Painter Painter
takes place in many places and in many media simultaneously. The 02 Feb panel discussion was preluded by a
revealing interview with curators Eric Crosby and Bartholomew Ryan by Cristina
Travaglini in the winter issue of Kaleidoscope (www.kaleidoscope-press.com/current-issue/), on-line through individual artist
blogs (http://www.walkerart.org/painter-painter-studio-sessions) and on-site via panel discussions,
studio visits and personal artist interactions.
Interestingly to me, as a viewer
attempting to interact with the show, we find ourselves discussing the
relationship between studio, gallery, market and public perception with very
incomplete access to the artists’ studios for instance. Only two of the artist blogs have been
populated and honestly, I would almost have expected camera-access to their
studios to experience the connection between the work in the gallery, the blog
manifesto and the applied studio time/location/process.
Given the international (multi-time-zonal) basis of the show, I find
that a significant opportunity that would be readily apparent to commercial
media studios, has been lost. Secondly,
we were asked by the panel to consider sidereal relationships and connections
to other artforms and non-art activities and objects. Yet, there are no apparent direct references
to fashion, music, the market, or anything else, really. In a way, we must find ourselves dealing with
abstract art theory and are called upon to discuss and imagine, or assume, that
such observable aspects of art must surely exist.
The panel discussion of last Saturday was
both informative and engaging, but rather much like an Art 101 course (which I
was glad to attend!).
Michelle Grabner of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and
contributor to Artforum, Art-Agenda and X-tra, and co-editor of The Studio Reader, led the panel with a
very literal engagement of Crosby and Ryan’s interest in the studio and the
process of creation as an extension of the object of the art piece or
painting. The Studio Reader examines the relationship between art space, the
studio, display space and artist’s living space.
Grabner discusses how these spaces are similar,
distinct, connected and segregated from one another. Regarding the artwork itself, she wonders how
much of the impact of a piece is in the object itself, and how much is based on
the process of being produced, being presented, being consumed and just plain being
as in itself definitive of the art piece and its overall art impact. Grabner wants to compare a piece of art and
its being to more active engagements
of the creative and receptive soul, such as poetry.
I am with her on this. Any basic art book will discuss the twin
activities of narrative cultural presentation (and reception), being the
extension of the piece back into culture and cultural referents, and the sense
of movement of the eye (or maybe even touch) within and over the canvas or
surface of the work – like a cinematographer filming each piece. If I follow, Grabner is expanding the purview
of the lens beyond the frames or borders of the physical piece to include the
location in which it is being viewed, the viewers, the viewers’ states of mind,
the artist (including their presence or absence) and the implied historical experience
of the piece in the studio, in the market and perhaps even in your own living
space… it is all up for grabs and is all part of the overall experience of art and of the art object.
Grabner broached the question as to the
extent to which a piece of art is both dependent on the artist, the location
and the viewer, and at the same time achieves an independent existence and
meaning outside of each individual relationship.
In other words, The Mona Lisa (my illustration) conveys the meaning of the artist, communicates something
to each individual viewer, both impacts and is impacted by its surroundings
(normally within the Louvre in Paris) and yet has achieved a personality and
historical presence of its own beyond all of these other relationships. Grabner would also have us note, I believe,
the Mona Lisa’s impact on and
presence in pop art and how those manifestations reflect back to and shape the
original, safely within its protective vault in the Louvre.
Berlin’s Jan Verwoert is a
critic, writer and teacher associated variously with Frieze Magazine, the Piet
Zwart Institute Rotterdam and Ha’MIdrasha School of Art in Tel Aviv. He has written Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the
Miraculous and Tell Me What You Want
What You Really Really Want.
Verwoert speaks of painting as a philosophy of action, drawing
a distinction between the classical (or heroic) model of action and the idea of
finality in that a piece might be
considered to be finished or complete, and rhythmacality in which art objects
exist in differing, non-static modalities that are perhaps in a sort of
perpetual, or a perpetually referenced, motion.
Verwoert seems to indicate several types of
sidereal motion, which he calls the lateral
crabwalk.
First, he discusses art in that a painting
is caused by its own process. In other
words, if you watch certain artists, they will just begin to work a piece, a
canvas, or a creative thread and just “see where it takes him or her” until a
specific direction and image becomes clear and manifests itself in such a way
that the piece seems to be the cause of itself.
For Verwoert, this process may take place
over varying lengths of time, according to its own tempo and might hang as a
finished work only to be taken up again and continued.
Verwoerts also sees this as a metaphor for
art theory in general, noting that art keeps closing only to reopen with new
work and new artists. He mentions Ed
Reinhardt and Marcel Duchamp specifically – especially Duchamp who “finished”
art history compulsively like a chess move, only to move the piece further at
another turn.
Verwoert is also the one who most
explicitly states the crabwalk of painting or even a painting into and towards other realms and genres from music to
fashion to pop media and advertising, the market place, etc. He ponders boundaries and the lack of
boundaries between these objects and realms and whether there is any meaning
within these characteristics.
Finally, Verwoert echoes Grabner’s topic in
contemplating the studio and boundaries between the private or personal and the
public. Studios intrude into the public,
the public intrudes into the studio – and by this, he is referencing both
studio as a place, and studio as a verb – that creation action and
contemplation that leads to or produces art.
He states that canvas is a space of hosting, it hosts the social
aspect/reception/presence of the art/studio and serves as a sort of cellophane
curtain between the public and the private, the creator and the viewer and the
projector and the projected.
Verwoert then returns to the first sort of
action and describes it as sort of a loop as in yarn that is reserved for an
extra stitch or audio tape that is trailed into a chamber to be looped into a
new relationship or instance. So the
first loop is that begun by working a medium until the shape and completed
image is manifest, i.e. closing the loop.
He adds to this the concept of rhythmacality. Rhythmacality provides the structure of
groove, groove being that beat in culture consisting of art, fashion, market,
life and environment. Artists respond to
groove to help reify or manifest that rhythmacality, acting not as the
initiating agent so much as they are a sort of synthesizer, mixer, or filter responding
to a rhythmic logarithm.
The importance of this artist synthesizer
is not that a completed work is created or realized but rather that a process
is initiated (in fact, the panelists briefly touch on post-Postmodernism as
Process or Relationalism) that effects that thing called art which is not
static but immediately engaged in and by all other adjacent aspects of
life.
Of the three, Verwoert’s presentation is the
most compelling and well worth the eventual Youtube.com search for a video
recording (not to be ironic).
Bruce Hainley is a contributing editor of Artforum and prolific author of No Biggie, Foul Mouth, John Waters, Art-A
Sex Book, and the forthcoming Under
the Sign of [sic]. He
teaches at Art Center College of Design and lives in Los Angeles.
Hainley on the other hand is an embodiment of
performance art, readily
exemplifying the interrelationships or adjacency of art, dialogue, fashion and
media. He is almost tooooo much,
seemingly sired by Andy Warhol, raised by Drag Queens and mentored by PeeWee
Herman – and none of this distracts from his actual brilliance, or his
presentation.
Hainley expressed more theory and dialogue
during the discussion panel referenced in part 1 of this review. His presentation served more to present thoughts and paradigms,
beginning with a viewing of the video to LE1F’s “soda” in order to demonstrate the complete disruption of definitive
boundaries within and between art(s). (Link
to LE1F’s “soda”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6herO1dIc4s)
Hainley then issued four statements (these
are not exact quotes):
- Nothing is Abstract. Nothing is Surreal. Nothing is more surreal or abstract than Reality.
- The lesson of Dietsch’s 2011 show at LA’s MOCA gallery is that artists are now on display rather than their work (Andy Warhol, etc.)
- Is the body/face of Michael Jackson not the most abstract and painted reality of today?
- Considering boundaries between art and ancillary events, in the terms of the actual versus the figurative, where would one even know where to put it all?
During the Q&A,
Hainley revealed deeper aspects of his thinking and worries about art,
including,
- What is adjacency versus distractedness, implying that distractedness might be natural or an intentional interjection into or exploitation of adjacency. He worries about who controls (or profits from) that distractedness.
- Referencing Timothy J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea, Hainley does not want to give up the romantic ideal of the linear epic journey in art where a hero-artist-type like Warhol embarks on a path to see where it will lead and accepts the challenges and tests peculiar to that path, with the idea of an eventual success, discovery or overcoming, in other words, achieving a finality to the quest.
A final thought by Hainley regarding the
lack of definition in painting or even as to what a painting is or is not,
might be summed by yet another LE1F video (not part of the presentation):
“Wut it is? Wut is up?
Wut is wut?; Wut it do? Wut it don’t…Wut is wut?”
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