Painting's Increased Necessity Amid The Ever Now                       B.A. (Hons) Fine Art Thesis  |  Award 1:1 
                                                                                                                                                                   Word count – 6706  |  January 2013
 

 

A painting need not be understood. Nor must there be a comprehension as to why a work may appeal to and challenge a viewer. An aficionado's learned beholding of a painting can indeed consummate the work in context
of what has and is transpiring in fine art. Though it is the standard person as beholder who contributes greatest to
a painting's existence in the world. By engaging in a challenge laid down by a resolutely open-ended painting, the apparent not-readily-informed person in turn challenges that painting. Whether or not it evokes certain feelings and associations relative to the human condition, or somehow signifies an aspect of known contemporary culture; these are among what can determine the beholder's engagement. François Pire wrote, in his 1967 book De l’imagination poétique dans l'œuvre de Gaston Bachelard, in connection with the French philosopher, how “the image provides access to a kind of knowledge that outmaneuvers the powers of intellect. The essential coincidence is between intuitionism and phenomenology.”1 By considering the various insights of artists, critics and philosophers; I will
attempt to pursue what I feel can be seen as painting's increased necessity as a pivotal encounter with the human hand and mind in tandem. As touchscreen technology has now become universal on all handheld devices of communication, it is but a ruse of tactility. They remain buttons, but within a newer interface.

Allow me now to hark slightly back almost two centuries to a Eugène Delacroix journal entry, “What inspires work,
is not new ideas, but the obsession with the idea that what has been said is still not enough.”2 Maintenance can
be required in holding fast to this obsession. But it is a necessity, as one continuously attempts to understand one's own studio output, and in conjunction, challenging one's own distinct perception as to why it cannot but coincide with an innate need to invent and subvert. This subjective largesse is levelled at individuation, belief systems, and at the intricacies of civilisation. Past and present are the arenas of pilferage and as the latter becomes the former, the future seems inconsequential. In trying to look ahead, we can rightly feel perturbed; as it is to our detriment that this hyper-rate of connectivity appears unrelenting, and may see us festering, stymied behind screens. Ever more so,
it feels as though the virtues of painting – chief among which are its aesthetically contemplative qualities – with Delacroix's words reverberating, are pertinent, the resultant challenge and within this we have a revalidation of painting and its human process.
 

When mentioning that the future hints at being a flummoxing bore for the most part – where the desire for instantaneity further prunes the waned attention span of Generation Y's aftermath – I am not stating this as a blinkered curmudgeon, rather as one who can only be glad of having been around to experience a touch more
of an archaically tactile society; of physically graspable entities. I will put forth a view that coincides with what
Bob Nickas wrote in his informative introduction to Painting Abstraction: (2009) where, in response to anybody being able to make an image on their picture phone, he states “Now, when the daily flood of images appears unrelenting, abstraction – even as it continues to abundantly introduce new images into the world – can be seen as an antidote.”3 We unavoidably receive information on the world's products as they tweak, upgrade and vie to be dominant in our preference. And so, in the fractured world of contemporary practice which Nickas aptly describes as “the post-everything world in which all art is now made”4, a compulsion of resistance must be prevalent in a painter's character; a partisan fortitude of painting as one of the last bastions in the true human dialogue.

Limitations as to what constitutes painting, materially or otherwise, do not exist in contemporary practice. This
is both daunting and exhilarating. Many artists who have studied painting steer clear of paint itself. Instead – with Tacita Dean as a prominent example – they have embraced newer media and strategies such as film/video, photography, installation and performance. It is the sensibility gained through the study of painting which lends their work its particular quality. When discussions occur surrounding Dean's 16mm films, serendipity is often raised, as
she says “I work just underneath the conscious level sometimes, and this is when amazing things surface. It's something that's so fragile.”5 In 2011 Dean made a relatively short film on Cy Twombly as he went about his studio;
it is a meditative work where, through her lens she unvoyeuristically observes an aged artist going about his daily routine.6 Twombly is one of four artists whose work and attitude will be looked at in some depth further along. I will begin with a Caravaggio; then Twombly; on to the German painter Katharina Grosse, and subsequently the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. There is no discernible affiliation between these four, and visually their work is markedly different to each other. It is perhaps that they have each furrowed their own trajectory, not only with success, but
also with a certain bloody-mindedness.  
 

In David Ryan's Art Monthly feature On Painting; he refrains from serving us another dish of painting's predicament with regards to its viability as expression in and amongst the broad range of contemporary art. What he does acknowledge early on is that “the everyday and the political”7 needs to be every bit as addressable in contemporary painting as such deliberations are often tackled in the new media landscape, such as the prevalent video art. I am glad of the extensive use of video which has infiltrated all disciplines – though much of this “free expression” can
be dismissible – as it invites a challenge onto painters who must already be grappling with centuries of painting;
art history itself. Ryan writes of how a network, an institution or even a whole culture8 comes into the equation
when a discourse surrounding a painting occurs. This roundabout manner, he adds, may not be quite what
a distinct work calls for. Ryan insists that “central to serious painting practice is a philosophical core lying somewhere between the phenomenological and the hermeneutical.”9 Here he ventures that these two strains of philosophy in relation to the graspability of an artist's intrinsic workings are the essence of a serious fine art vocation, and that attempts to comprehend a painting have got to be coming from a place reasonably fluent in both these strains. Perhaps not fluency as such, but to be able to use these as filters for which to view a work with comprehension.

As a compliment to Ryan's On Painting, Derek Whitehead's essay Artist's Labor in Contemporary Aesthetics is quite relevant with the crux being Whitehead's investigation into Maurice Merleau-Ponty's “hermeneutic insights into artistic activity”10, and through a phenomenological aspect, how an artist's intuitive perception remains the originating position by which art undergoes creation. Relative to the varying art practices of the unconventional times wherein
we are settled (or unsettled), Whitehead writes of the artist's working consciousness in relation to personal and cultural address “from an artist's standpoint, art is concerned with the communication of internalized responses to outward reality, responses which remain untranslatable other than in created terms.”11 The challenge facing artists
of considered consciousness is constantly expanding as the virtual and the hyper-real have become a major force.
As a riposte, dependent on the integrity of our aesthetic intelligence12 and our capacity to recognise nuances and openings in this ever now, it is for us to declare our interdependency and be mindfully current, not only as thinkers,
but as creators.
 

Take Caravaggio (1571-1610) – an artist whose blatant talents were distinct at the time – as he dismissed painting's de rigueur classical idealism which had been considered standard practice, sauntering out with unruliness from under Michelangelo's (1475-1564) dense overshadow. Caravaggio's painting The Cardsharps (1595) [Fig. 1] is psychological in its complexity, depicting “two cheats and one dupe.”13 Twenty-four years old when he painted this,
it is considered to be his first masterpiece.14 The young Caravaggio is brave and mischievous in the staging of the composition, using street models, with the dupe being more elegantly dressed; and this youth may well have been situated in this attire to exemplify an innocence at which the artist could direct his homoerotic yearnings. Robert Hughes observed of the youths in Caravaggio's paintings as “overripe peachy bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream.”15 Known for being headstrong and prodigious from his early youth he had arrived in Rome determined to make his mark. One can envisage him with concentrated scowl leaning against the jamb of his studio entrance ...how shall I depict the now in street terms, while tickling potential patrons; well it's all murder and gambling out here, and cheatingly so at the same time...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Painting his subjects as the eye sees them with natural flaws and defects, Caravaggio captures a scenario of deception and innocence, while the prospect of violence looms as the younger cheat's sheathed weapon testifies.
In the main however, as Tom Lubbock observes, it is about concealment.16 We are able to see what is unfolding, making us feel in on the game, whereas the dupe cannot. Open to the beholder, putting us on the side of the professionals; but concealed to the victim. In contemporary painting, concealment locates the beholder as just
that, who often as not – through a work's ambiguity – must find their own way in.

The acknowledgement of time or temporality in painting is for the most part disregarded.17 As to whether a labour-intensive work impacts as an immediacy of contemporary relevance; or of a painting which, in its execution, is
devoid of embellishments but for its realisation as an object on a wall. Time spent in its formulation can be entirely concealed, but is not immaterial. Be it multiple failures through experimentation with medium, tireless reworkings, insurmountable doubts waylaid by irresolution; a painting, no matter how minimal or seemingly flippant in gesture, came to be through a process over time. Each artist has their own process, and regarding an artist's vision – that is they give themselves over to the immersion a work requires – which Merleau-Ponty believes is acquired through a facility for development of one's own visual language, and that the artist's vision “learns only by seeing and learns
only from itself.”18 Whitehead writes of a certain “potent encounter with the depths”19, where he states Paul Klee (1879-1940) as one who transmitted from his own interiority, and made manifest. Depths here are the nuances
in the surrounds of all that we can see; invariably a forthcoming of that which is concealed.

As a nation we are encountering depths in all walks, and all throughout society's structure. A bailout of yet
another European nation's economy is more expected than not. Hearing of the latest populace to become
exhausted is exhaustive in itself. The media theorist Bifo-Franco Berardi, wrote two small books as a participant
in dOCUMENTA (13) which took place during the summer of 2012. One such book transverse states that so long
as individual cultures and their way of life can resist and not react to the scale of capitalism's exhaustion of society's resources, by embracing frugality and displaying an affinity rather than greed and rivalry; then Europe II may be a
real possibility.20 Berardi relates this exhaustion to a certain insurrection which inevitably approaches and “will be based on withdrawal and a refusal to lend life to the machine, based on the overall rejection of participation in the malignant trap of democracy, on the refusal of time, and on the creation of an autonomous time-space.”21 Artists,
he states are integral to the present and onward, as they will in time give considered form to the transformation
of this exhaustion; but for now, it is the painful aspect which they must be dealing with. Invited to feature in the
same dOCUMENTA (13) was the German artist Kai Althoff (1966). He had initially signed up a year or two previously (it takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany), but became so daunted by the prospect he wrote a letter to
its curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev stating that such an exhaustive obligation “will crush me”. This letter was exhibited in his stead.22

There is on occasion a need for artists to teeter along the edge of a self-inflicted feeling of being crushed; also recognised as pushing preconceived limits. Such fortitude for the development of one's practice comes with the vocation. These are depths which may or may not be reached. There is, in the world, a notion of apeiron. Having always had a place in indigenous traditions who know it as Spider Woman, the World Creatrix, the Trickster23
among others; it seems, according to Steven M. Rosen in his book A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation that this apeiron has reared up, gained a foothold and is relevant in our current plight. He suggests that the predicament facing postmodernity is “[t]he disruption of space and time, and, along with it, of all the points
of reference used by individuals and groups in the past to plot their life courses”24. Apeiron is immeasurable and “embodies the ambiguity at our core that must be brought to light and consciously processed if we are to attain fulfillment as human beings.”25 Western culture doesn't like the indeterminate or the unintelligible, and seeing as
it was created from a grappling of human reason with the illogical boundlessness of nature26, the notion of apeiron
is not too likely to be embraced, yet.

I think this is, in a way what Christov-Bakargiev, the curator of dOCUMENTA (13) has attempted. She has suggested another, if not the next phase of thinking. She fitted out the vast exhibition with diverse displays of objects so as to form a response and garner an understanding of objects; outwardly, from themselves. Steven Henry Madoff writes
of this in Modern Painters that the question posed by Christov-Bakargiev “at the heart of the heart of her exhibition
is not who thinks, but what thinks.”27 Thing theorists – who have emerged as a group over the last ten years and
are interested in material culture – have greatly influenced this dOCUMENTA; as they position the human as a
solitary player among all objects in the world28. Returning to apeiron, and rethinking ourselves from our own depths
– from where apeiron resides – in relation to an artist's individuation; it has been a method of human reflectivity
which Rosen says has “always been geared to turn whatever it seeks to know into an object, including itself. In this way it has alienated itself, even as it has striven for self-intimacy.”29 For the artist's individuation, tough self-reflective demands have to be made, and instead of moving away from their self towards their object, must delve back in to their own depth to locate themselves there, and in doing so, engage with the “prereflective source of his reflection.”30 In locating the self in such an unchartered thought process, the challenge, and by extension the thrill of an all-pervasive uncertainty is that the individual comes to realise they are neither only a disconnected subject,
nor solely an object. Rather, the individual is the “embodied fusion of subject and object that constitutes the paradox of apeiron.”31 If this dOCUMENTA is about the individual projecting themselves outwards from within objects, then
the notion of apeiron has to be ventured towards, so as to experience the object as interconnected to the ambiguity which resides in the depths of all things; subjectively, ourselves.

The paintings of Cy Twombly (1928-2011) are cryptic. They have an allure that entices rather than demands contemplation, but contemplate one ought. Emerging from the back of the scene of those second generation
Abstract Expressionists,32 he soon upped and left his peers in New York for good in the mid-to-late fifties, bound
for immersion into Italy. It was the real tangible history of European culture to which he could relate and according
to Mel Gooding, this “lay the basis for a mythic dimension to his story”33. But more crucially for us, it was an arena wherein Twombly thrived, and with expressive whorls of energy offered up his emotive surge. Contemplating an engagement with the surface in sight, he would sit for some hours before the reaching down – apeiron – within
himself achieved a certain fruition and he would work for a flurrysome spell while so tapped in. A 2007 conversation
in Rome with Tate Modern's director Nicholas Serota offers an insight; “you build yourself up psychologically, and
so painting has no time for brush. Brush is boring, you give it and all of a sudden it's dry, you have to go. Before
you cut the thought, you know? You want to contain the thought.”34
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) wrote a statement for a 1951 Twombly solo show in Chicago, and in it described
the young artist's painting process as “orgiastic and rational, often surprisingly simply symmetrical, and invariably harmonious.”35 Though much of the marks we see in Twombly's paintings and drawings are ciphers, it is the
vastness of his array of allusion to historical culture, and referencing loss, absence and debauchery. Robert Hughes wrote in 1994 of the loss prevalent in Twombly's work, in that the way he developed his own not-so-decorous sgraffiti mark-making – which lay somewhere in amongst Pollock's drip-squiggles and the later de Kooning gestural loops – could imply a restrained anger at having detached himself from his American contemporaries. Even though loss, as
a theme insists Hughes, is to the fore with Twombly; what seems more evident is that “Its model is the palimpsest,
the document in which a later text effaces the earlier.”36 This could be seen as an apeiron-corrective in the artist's working consciousness. At times he provides somewhat of an annotation in the work, a signifier. The seasons, and nature frequent his paintings, but it is more often than not a heroic mythological character. Bacchus (2005) [Fig. 2]
for instance, is one such painting, albeit without said annotated signifier. The paint itself suffices in the manner it is applied, as it whorls gesturally in unrestrained exuberance. Shown here [Fig. 2] is one of three Bacchus paintings on permanent display in Tate Modern, and, as the dictionary states; Bacchus (also known as Dionysus) “is a god of wine
who loosens inhibitions and inspires in music and poetry.”37 The other two words which make up its full title refer to the dual nature of the god, both sensual pleasure (Psilax), and violent debauchery (Mainomenos).38 The painting is unsettlingly hypnotic, and while the largely thick, controlled looseness of brushwork in roseate/red wine/blood hues gallivants in soars and plummets, the cascading dribbles bring to mind drunken spillage and a gravitational draining away of “life blood”39. Steely intent has to be present if one is to advantageously incorporate the accidental. The fact is that Twombly often identifies by name rather than depicting, and in doing so he is free to mark-make from his uncoiled given thought upon the remainder of surface. As Jeffrey Weiss describes “the presentness of Twombly's work (the support as a field of agency) characterizes pictorial space as a site across which strewn marks represent the residue of corporeal passage, of drift.”40 His paintings repeatedly allude to reverie, with the self as dreamer in
an unformed world; as Weiss describes “within this frame, process and drift, as material properties of pictorial form, both serve and figure a phenomenology of imagination.”41
 

In Ryan's On Painting he writes of the “porous borders that current practice has re-found”42 and that there is
a restraint when it comes to recognition of one of the fundamental elements in a painting's appreciation: time.
“[T]he temporality of a work’s making is a primary key to meaning.”43 Here he is alluding to “its direct negotiation
of the medium.”44 Within a reconfiguring that must freely take place in the rumble of happenstance, between the envisioned idea (a prerequisite) and its realisation through the artist’s working consciousness on a surface or in a space; a “slippage”45 takes place. This uncertainty is pivotal in painting. How the particulars of the medium arrive
at form, an intensity which can often be marked by urges propelled by a frustrating need to be pushing ever further. Climax. Time captured.

 

Directly oppositional to the convergence of human senses that go into the physical act of painting, and in cohorts
with the cerebral; is the online cyber devotee who worships and attends to their connective smartphone (shield) with
a reverence that is undergoing a near total replacement of actual frontal human interaction. Online communication seems to be replacing humane engagement, and in the manner of how the majority – Generation Y onwards – have taken to it, it is overwhelming confirmation of the desire for virtuality. In our age of instant mass communication,
no emerging artist is deemed worth their salt unless they have a visible online presence in the form of a website.
In addition, many artists attend regularly to their own online blog, or are liked/followed on social media websites.
Most artists could be deemed to be introverts rather than extroverts, but then again the same can be said of society. There may be a notion out there that introverted users of social media sites alleviate their feelings of isolation and loneliness by harmlessly updating their fellows as to what they are up to, or down with; but this is not overly wholesome. Users can quickly tire of the harmless and turn toxic, bullying for all to see; the repercussions of which are often tragic. Instead of being engaging as communicative social beings, they are more often than not idling,
opting for a quick-fix and cheap-kicks, somewhat stifled from becoming rounded people. A huge element is that
those who are introverted can put forth their personality, from behind a safe barrier from where they vent and attempt witticisms that they would in no way do in person. It is the mask of our despondent times. They are their avatar.

Painting and society must in turn regress to progress. In a twenty minute talk entitled After The Future, Bifo Franco-Berardi has spoken of a person's need to live in time, that we do not need more property, or things; do not need to keep accumulating or obsess over continued growth; this only leads to an exploitation of our life, as he remonstrates “Everything has to be sacrificed for the growth, for the growth, for the growth; this abstract of growth of money, profit, of value: of nothing.”46 Quickly becoming calmer, Bifo introduces his post-futurism segment where he states that what we need is time and joy. Time for self-care, self-education, self-joy and to embrace singularity; the joy of becoming yourself. And on singularity; we must take pleasure in the decomposition of ourselves.47 In his book of the same
name After The Future (2011) he talks of how we can still visualise distant spaces, whereas we can see distant time no more. However, he notes of how space increases to proportions beyond limitless since virtual space has come along, but in contemplating time he says “There is no such thing as a time of virtuality, because time is only in life, decomposition. Virtuality is the collapse of the living; it is panic taking power in temporal perception.”48 When it comes to reaching out online for recreational purposes (sports journalism, migrated family and such), I too have unwittingly developed into a culprit of this instantaneity, but in a form of defence; am very much aware of my culpability.

What ends up being the resultant painting varies hugely from what was envisioned – idea, thought, inkling or jumping-off point – and once it is down, recalling to one's mind that initial pre-painting motive can be elusive. If the painting is as initially perceived, then nothing has happened in the act of painting. And it is an unusual word, painting; functioning both as a verb and a noun, I am ........  this is a ........ But I digress. When it comes to attitude in contemporary painting practice, none seem much freer or spatially ambitious than Katharina Grosse (1961). She
is an artist who more than any broke out of the picture format, way out from the confining area which Tom Lubbock refers to in relation to traditional painting; that which would “enframe”49. Grosse unlimits her work. She works mainly
in very large spaces, often taking over an entire gallery; walls, floors, ceilings, windows, elevators and staircases.
By wearing a protective head-to-toe boiler suit with something akin to a welder's mask on and breathing apparatus, she is at once removed from the very space she works in, and detaching even further, uses an industrial device
for her spray painting. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), by dripping his paint onto grounded canvas; removed
contact between the painter and surface. Grosse is conscious of her furthering Pollock's methods, as she told Jonathan Watkins in 2002, “I'm very aware recently that I'm not actually in the space. What I'm wearing actually isolates me from the space... And using spray paint I don't actually touch the space. The only way I'm connected to
the space physically is by walking.”50 Not dissimilar to the Twombly [Fig. 2], Grosse's gestural spray painting is extreme as she physically exerts herself throughout the given space, and a cherry-picker has to be heavily involved
in such a process. All sorts of objects have been interwoven into her onsite works prior to getting the primary and secondary colour spray treatment, such as lengthy bookshelves, styrofoam boards, soil, bed, furniture, rubble,
rocks and what are termed various objects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She will make paintings on canvas and they too will be incorporated to be interfered with. When it comes to formal issues in her work, she is not too forthcoming. Aware of the universal appeal of her work, Grosse states that the
forms her work evolves into are simply intuitive, reactive. Speaking to Peter Dickenson in Turps Banana in response to his point about the beholder being challenged and becoming immersed into, rather than taking the work in, she states that “formal issues are something we can discuss but they are nothing other than a bridge to deeper motivations, which I may not be so conscious of. It also has to do with aggression.”51 When, again speaking to Watkins, she revealed another similarity to Twombly in relation to the directness needed as looking, thinking and painting are happening concurrently during the act itself, “Spray painting is different to painting with a brush, because to some extent the brush gets in the way.”52 She works by responding to initial instinctive marks laid down while exploring the space, her domain for the duration. Soon the responsive marks begin to dictate themselves in a way, and the experience of looking at a picture develops, but it is never really, or even remotely what she thought it may turn out as at the outset, and of this she discloses “I feel like my work, in this sense, is narrative, without telling a story. It's about marking my presence, existing, triggering off a range of associations.”53
 

A feeling of doubt seems to be more frequently apparent, not merely from the viewers standpoint, but of an evident doubting during the act, and this indecision transmits itself from the artist through a painting; that they themselves have struggled with what to attempt and convey. Raphael Rubinstein terms it as a “kind of provisionality within the practice of painting.”54 It is a sketchy aspect to the appearance of an increasing number of artist's work that leads Rubinstein to list off terms such as “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling”55 when he mentions some mature artists such as Albert Oehlen (1954), Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012), Mary Heilmann (1940) and
Michael Krebber (1954). As I noted Bob Nickas having pointed out abstract painting as an antidote to the relentlessly abundant deluge of images introduced into the world; what constitutes provisional painting so far as I can see, is;
that if the world is altogether steadily being virtualised in every regard, you are going to have people attempting art through these digitised means. But within this 'Next thing Right Now' environment, artists who paint in what could be acknowledged as a preliminary, dashed-off or offhand way, are actually attempting what is deemed out of the question. That is, to create what has historically been known as a masterpiece. This impossibility or irrelevance,
which painters do not seem to accept, can be seen with various emerging artists playing with, as Rubinstein notes “the idea of impossibility in painting. This has led them to reject a sense of finish in their work, or to rely on acts of negation.”56 I have had on my fridge for quite some time a da Vinci reproduction of Saint Jerome dated 1488-90. It is oil on walnut and resides in the Musei Vaticani, Vatican City. Da Vinci has Jerome gazing upwards in a robe on one knee, in amongst boulders with a lion lying down in front of him. The majority of typical backdrop and ground is murkily painted; Jerome's head, collarbone and non-kneeling leg are too. The rest is sketched, nothing amazing,
just indicators for a mane, spine, folds, a distant grand building. He lived for another thirty years, so Saint Jerome must have been simply abandoned. Thankfully; as there is so much more to it as is, a real dialogue is at play
between deliberation and indecision. There is a lineage from Joan Miró (1893-1983) to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) to Richard Tuttle (1941), where in various ways, a lot of their investigations resemble provisionality. Rubinstein surmises that this provisional mindset “is not about making last paintings, nor is it about the deconstruction of painting... [it] is major painting masquerading as minor painting.”57

Our body is physically in this world, and while so, sensory experience is constantly imbued upon it. For the artist, Whitehead says, this “embodiment involves the twofold dynamic of perception and expression.”58 Art becomes the result of such intensity; the artist's heightened working consciousness at play. Though Merleau-Ponty tends to stress that it is the secondary undertaking of expression itself, having been embarked upon “in the least perception”59, that essentially becomes the key ingredient in the triptych of perception–expression–creation. Boris Groys – writing in 2009 – sees a perception of the present, and, aligned with the acts of negation in provisional painting; denotes the contemporary, the present, as being “actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision... Today we
are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future. We simply lose our time.”60 But this wastage of time can, he declares, be turned positively into excessive time, “as time that attests to our life as pure being-in-time, beyond its use within the framework of modern economic and political projects.”61 He reflects on modernisation and how, with all its promise, can be now seen as unfulfilling “precisely because it never led to any
real result.”62 As an example Groys uses a Francis Alÿs (1959) video Politics of Rehearsal (2007); which chronicles
a rehearsal of a striptease act where the provoking of sexual desire – invoked promise – always remains frustratingly unfulfilled63. He also writes of how film represented modernity's obsession with speed and energy over contemplative art by comparing them as “vita activa over vita contemplativa.”64 But where one restricts movement the other encourages it. Watching a film in the cinema, even though what is being consumed is all about speed, energy
and power; one is immobile in their seat for the duration. On the other side, vita contemplativa, while time and
a willingness to engage are prerequisites, the beholder is moving back and forth, motioning themselves around
the exhibition.

Luc Tuymans (1958), has in a way turned vita activa into vita contemplativa. Long recognised as having a wide influence on European painters who have emerged since the millennium, he has formed an oeuvre by taking on
such risky fields of investigation as the Holocaust that seemingly deny appropriate representation.65 But art bends
to what is not deemed appropriate. In his insightful 2004 essay The Tuymans Effect, Jordan Kandor observes that
the artist, in introducing a shorthanded method to depicting photographs or film-stills is “undermining the very idea
of technical expertise by highlighting 'clumsy' brushwork”66. In addition, he ambiguously crops many photographs
prior to them being using as source and by working this way he plainly pursues a “formal failure”67. In doing
so “Tuymans' paintings have provided a model and encouragement for younger artists to plunge liberally into
the medium, freed.”68 It is this crude or unfinished appearance, with heavy reliance on a washed-out aesthetic – leaving pencil marks of the initial compositional underdrawing exposed – that draws attention to its medium and
the viable conundrum of what is representable through paint.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Zwirner's London gallery held Tuymans' latest exhibition in October of 2012 which at its heart, were a series
of “paintings of facsimile paintings reproduced on film and in turn photographed from a computer screen.”69 The film
is a Hollywood notion of the romantic ideal of a male artist's paintings on an exotic island. The Moon and Sixpence (1942) is loosely based on a Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)-type artist, and after his death in the film, a doctor arrives
to view these final paintings in a hut where they are kept.70 Upon photographing the paused film, the flare from
lights is caught on his monitor, and a further presence can be observed, Tuymans' own silhouette.71 They are the most colourful of his work to date, a nod to the film switching from black and white into dramatic Technicolor as
soon as the doctor engages with the hut's paintings.72 Tuymans stated recently in regard to his own brooding concerns as an artist “within the real”73, in comparison to Gauguin's personal search for paradise “I don’t believe
in the utopic. I’ve made work about how the utopic has been deleted.”74 With this series of Allo! paintings, it is to prolong the imagery, to further it by other means; “It's a joke on modernism, basically.”75

Neon-lighting structured words have for some time been a popular means for artists to get their idea/message/wit
out into the world. A neon from a conceptual artist such as Joseph Kosuth (1945) in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art's permanent collection: I am only describing language, not explaining anything. (1991)76;
to Tracey Emin (1963), a multidisciplinary artist who – while she did her initial studying through paint – has, with increased frequency been exhibiting confessional angst-laden neon messages. While implying all sorts of backstory, one is as the rest are. In a form of rescue, Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci (1939), can delight us by examining
the “rapport between art, language, and image”77, with a neon work such as his 1969 offering: The Missing Poem
is the Poem. In a documented conversation between Jacques Rancière and W.J.T. Mitchell in 2009 entitled
What Do Images Want, the discussion centres around how to “emancipate the image from visuality.”78 A question
is posed to Rancière as to whether or not it is achievable to enable the same image to emerge through a diverse range of pictures and other media. He confirms that to him it is possible, and that it is vital to point out that an image
is not just a replica, nor strictly a visual form, but is “a set of relations between the visible and the sayable... and
also, very often, a temporal relation, between a time and another time, an after and a before”79. To emphasise his relational point, Rancière looks back to nineteenth-century writers who paved the way – as art critics – for abstract painting; owing to the fact that, back then, as writers they conceived of an abstract reading into figurative painting.80
In addition, Mitchell states that between image and language, it is always a relationship; “seeable vs. sayable”81
– the home side in this matchup can rotate – also blend into, and/or stimulate one another.

One artist who elucidates sufficient brilliance when describing what it is that occurs when a person from my neck
of painting attempts to create something is Philip Guston (1913-1980). A painting reaches a point. Seeing with new eyes on one's return, and if there is a recoil, and a chewing of inside mouth corner; let there be a weighing up of means and extents by which to go about the nameless. Setting upon the painting by such weighed-up means; there could be glory or there may just be another chance to genuinely laugh at oneself, either result is to be savoured. Guston's drive, from his depths, was, as he puts it that “you had to prove to yourself, that truly the act of creation
was still possible.”82 The paintings of the masters that he looked to all emitted a fundamental quality of the artist having completely lost himself in its making, and the content, while evident, did not sway his feeling towards the
work, “they felt as if something living like a living organism was posited there on this canvas, on this surface.”83 Guston insisted in a 1972 conversation with his friend the poet Clark Coolidge that an artist has to always do something for the first time.84 He acknowledges that this can only come from discontent; an extremely hard perspective to acquire with regard to one's work, and this, he termed a “principle of discontent.”85 He then changed, for he became tired of searching out enigmatic ambiguity through his work, and that a different approach offered
or revealed an ambiguity with more depth, through simple objects, that emitted a somewhat recognisable feeling
of form, more of an enigma than before, more substantial; a coveting towards “tangibilia.”86 Individuation finds
oneself only through self-trust, though a critical awareness must be arterial to this self-trust. If looking back dismissively at one's previous artwork which was undertaken and wholly believed in at the time of its execution, Guston queries “Are you denying your conviction at the time you did that? And can you? Should you? Self-trust.”87

In society now, more so than ever before, the aspirations of peoples' lives are being lived out through fictions
and deeds transported to us on screens. Escapism, too, in an online connective sense, has potentially become
a problematic addiction. Of course, as the print industry shifts more towards an online presence, and with families
and communities now dispersed throughout different lands; there is much to be gained by way of the web. But its tangibility is only cerebral, not bodily. To my reckoning; painting’s uniqueness as the epitome of both cerebral, and bodily, stands up in the face of this. Although there has been a steady realisation come about, that possessions are not so important, and more specifically; that there is a revalidation of experiential living – not just an existence to be carried through as a life, heeding all the noise we are encumbered with. Just as artworks reproduced through high quality print or by digitised means can briefly suffice, and offer a visual tingle, there is simply no substitute for the immediate engagement one enters into with a painting or a painting installation – as the artist intended it to be experienced. Painting's noble escapism, in the form of offering a subversive slant on normalcy, or of being disruptive in an affirmative way; is an artist endeavouring to impart their voice through this enduringly fresh medium. The necessity of the continual questioning of its merits evidences painting as just that, a necessity. Returning to Delacroix's idea of why, in art, we keep obsessing to look in at and out from ourselves; it is only to conclude that
we have always to return to fundamentals for the new to emerge. Here and now is all we can contend with, and as answers persist to elude, we must keep questioning this ever now by going continuously back to cearnóg a haon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Endnotes

01 Perraudin, J.-F., A non-Bergsonian Bachelard - Gaston Bachelard, Continental Philosophy Review, Dec 2008, p.2
02 Myers, T.R., PAINTING, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, London, 2011, p.12
03 Nickas, B., Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, Phaidon Press Ltd., London, 2009, p.7
04 ibid., p.7
05 O'Reilly, S., Tacita Dean, Art Review (London, England), October 2011, Issue 53, p.81
06 Coldiron, P., Tacita Dean | The House Next Door, Sept 10, 2011,
   http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/tag/tacita-dean/
07 Ryan, D., On Painting, Art Monthly, London, Issue 355, April 2012, p.9
08 ibid., p.9
09 ibid., p.10
10 Whitehead, D., Artist's Labor, Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 5, 2007,
     http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=466
11 ibid.
12 ibid.
13 Lubbock, T., Great Works – Caravaggio: Cardsharps (1595), The Independent, Arts & Ents, Art, Sept 28, 2008,
     http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/caravaggio-cardsharps-1595-942660.html
14 http://www.caravaggio-foundation.org/biography.html
15 Hughes, R., Nothing If Not Critical, The Harvill Press, London, 2001, p.34
16 Lubbock, op. cit.
17 Ryan, op. cit., p.11
18 Whitehead, op. cit.
19 ibid.
20 Berardi, B-F., transverse, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, No. 094, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2012, p.8
21 ibid., p.16
22 ibid., p.16
23 Rosen, S. M. Ph.D., Dimensions of Apeiron - A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation, ReVision,
     Heldref Publications, Washington DC, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2004, p.16
24 ibid., p.17
25 ibid., p.16
26 ibid., p.17
27 Madoff, S. H., The Rise of Thing Theory - on DOCUMENTA (13), Modern Painters, New York, Volume XXIV, Number 8, 2012 p.82
28 ibid., p.82, 84
29 Rosen, op. cit., p.22
30 ibid., p.22
31 ibid., p.22
32 Gooding, M., Cy Twombly - Whitemanesque Plenitude and Capacity for Self-Contradiction, Flash Art International,
     No. 139, Mar-Apr 1988, p.102
33 ibid., p.102
34 Interview between Cy Twombly and Nicholas Serota, Rome 2007. History behind the thought. Writings 5.
     http://www.cytwombly.info/twombly_writings5.htm
35 Bird, J., Indeterminacy and (Dis)order in the work of Cy Twombly, Oxford Art Journal, Oxford University Press,
     Volume 30, No. 3, 2007, p.495
36 Hughes, R., Robert Hughes on Cy Twombly, 1994, http://hi.baidu.com/fishplay/item/2cd80edbef361a3ae3108fbd
37 http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/Dionysus
38 De Santis, G., Tate Modern, http://www.flickr.com/photos/giuseppedesantis/6125366990/
39 Bird, op. cit., p.504
40 Weiss, J., Cy Twombly, Tate Modern London, Artforum International, Vol. 47 No.2, Oct 2008, p.370
41 ibid., p.370
42 Ryan, op. cit., p.11
43 ibid., p.11
44 ibid., p.11
45 ibid., p.12
46 Berardi, B-F., After The Future, twenty-minute talk (online). 'Growth' segment 6min 10sec in, April 12, 2012,
     http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/bifo-on-futurism-post-futurism-with-some-stuff-about-lenin-thrown-in/
47 ibid., 'Decomposition' segment 7min 20sec in)
48 Berardi, B-F., (Eds: Genosko, G., Thoburn, N.), After The Future, AK Press, California, 2011, p.40
49 Bell, J., Until Further Notice, I Am Alive by Tom Lubbock – review, The Guardian, Culture, Books, March 23, 2012,
     http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/23/until-further-notice-lubbock-review
50 Watkins, J., Katharina Grosse: In Conversation with //2002, PAINTING, Documents of Contemporary Art,
     Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, London, 2011, p.161
51 Dickinson, P., Katharina Grosse in conversation, Turps Banana, London, Issue 11, 2012, p.8
52 Watkins, op. cit., p.162
53 ibid., p.162
54 Rubinstein, R., Provisional Painting, Art in America, May 2009, p.123
55 ibid., p.134
56 ibid., p.131
57 ibid., p.134
58 Whitehead, op. cit.
59 ibid.
60 Groys, B., Comrades Of Time, Part of a special issue- What is contemporary art - e-flux, Issue 11, Dec2009, p.4
61 ibid., p.4
62 ibid., p.6
63 ibid., p.6
64 ibid., p.8
65 Kantor, J., The Tuymans Effect//2004, PAINTING, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, London,
     2011, p.170
66 ibid., p.170
67 ibid., p.170
68 ibid., p.170
69 Zwirner, D., LUC TUYMANS Allo!, David Zwirner Gallery exhibition press release, London, October 2012, p.2
70 ibid., p.1
71 ibid., p.2
72 ibid., p.2
73 Sherwin, S., Luc Tuymans, AnOther Magazine, London, Issue 23, Autumn-Winter 2012, p.402
74 ibid., p.402
75 Haq, N., Q&A with Luc Tuymans, Modern Painters, New York, Volume XXIV, Number 8, p.63
76 http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/collection/browse/creation_date/6/73
77 Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Maurizio Nannucci, Artist Profile,
     http://www.guggenheimvenice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/biografia.php?id_art=178
78 Rancière, J., Mitchell, W.J.T., What Do Pictures Want?, Art Press, no. 362, December 2009, p.36
79 ibid., p.36
80 ibid., p.37
81 ibid., p.36/37
82 Guston, P., Conversation with Joseph Ablow - Boston University 1966, Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations
     / Ed. Clark Coolridge, London: University of California Press, Ltd., 2011, p.58
83 ibid., p.59
84 Guston, P., On Drawing, Yale Summer School of Music and Art Talk, Connecticut, 1974, Collected Writings,
     Lectures and Conversations / Ed. Clark Coolridge, London: University of California Press, Ltd., 2011, p.259
85 Guston, P., Conversation with Clark Coolidge, Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations
     / Ed. Clark Coolridge, London: University of California Press, Ltd., 2011, p.191
86 ibid., p.193
87 Guston, On Drawing... op. cit., p.267