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- Volume 2, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2016
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Stout’s doubt
By Alison GreenAbstractThis article looks at the American painter Myron Stout (1908–1987) in relation to arguments made in the early to mid-1960s around abstract art, as well as later historical re-evaluations of Minimalism. Using ‘doubt’ as explored by both Richard Shiff and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I propose a re-reading of an artist who has been historically and aesthetically displaced. In the end I argue for a productive understanding of temporal resistances.
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Intoxicating painting
By Mark HarrisAbstractThis article discusses a selection of abstract paintings in relation to their representation or inducement of states of intoxication. It questions the high esteem conferred on works created by intoxicated artists in comparison with the low regard in which works of Op and Psychedelic Art are held, a result it seems of the latter’s commitment to visual disorientation. Evaluation of the respective intellectual environments of New York and Paris in the 1960s reveals the ideological conditions underlying the dismissal of the paintings of European artists such as Victor Vasarely and Francois Morellet by their New York counterparts, despite the close similarities of some of their work. The judgements made by the New York milieu reveal a disinvestment in the utopian ideals and politicized avant-garde that European artists felt were sustained by the optical geometries of their paintings. It is argued that in North America similar visual vocabularies were commonly indexed to cycles of fashion in an economy driven by accelerated consumption. Evidence of new forms of intoxication in the visual languages of contemporary practices reveals the continuation of political initiatives such as Thomas Hirschhorn’s engagement of working-class communities in the liberatory theory of Georges Bataille or Donald Moffett’s representation of autonomous sites of gay ecstatic experiences. Throughout the article links are made between the imagery of painting and the intensely visual evidence of first-hand accounts of LSD experiences.
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David Diao’s postcards from the edge of late modernism
More LessAbstractSince the 1980s, the painter David Diao has sought to occupy the position of a critical insider with respect to some of the modernist painting of the last century. Through the exploitation of strategies ordinarily associated with postmodernism – appropriation, pastiche and blank irony – Diao has managed successfully to develop a body of work whose aesthetic and narrative content differs markedly from that of his peers. Disavowing pronouncements on the irrevocable failure of modernism, Diao opts to place the resources of expression found in works by Kazimir Malevich to Barnett Newman at the disposal of a uniquely autobiographical project of cultural memory and retrieval.
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Michel Parmentier: Painting for nothing
More LessAbstractThis article addresses the work and thought of the French painter Michel Parmentier, a figure whose attacks on painterly subjectivity and traditional modes of authorship are seen as among the most radical in post-war art. It draws upon recently discovered letters from Parmentier to his friend and fellow painter Simon Hantaï, whose signature method of pliage, or ‘folding’, Parmentier adapted to his own ends. Special attention is paid to the idea of painting ‘for nothing’, a notion that underpins Parmentier’s practice from his celebrated collaborations with Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Niele Toroni in the crucial year 1967 through his works on paper of the later 1980s and 1990s.
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Constraints between picture and painting: Some considerations at a distance
By Moyra DerbyAbstractThis article considers a series of constraints active in the abrasive interface between picture and painting. The term constraint is used in reference to Margaret Boden’s research into the computational mechanisms underlying creativity, constraints understood as productive limits that test a given field or convention. The space between picture and painting is full of strongly defended divisions, and inevitable overlaps, and it can be a cluttered and contentious field for a practitioner to negotiate. The aim is in part to bypass an oppositional mindset that cuts off descriptive and imitative impulses for painting and picture from abstract positions and to access the constructed forms of pictorial convention by a different route. In order to avoid a dead-end opposition, a distance from painting and picture is established through a close examination of an early artefact of mark making and counting in the form of a small clay ball called a bulla. Dating from around 3500 bce, the bulla reference depends on the archaeological research of Denise Schmandt-Besserat and on a description by Georges Ifrah as a key example in the development of numeration. The bulla is identified as a point where distinctions between number, word, object and picture are not fixed and their interdependencies are clear and productive. In this article the particular qualities of the bulla facilitates thoughts about three interlocking terms: likeness, representation and depiction. Each term is addressed in turn, framed as ‘testing likeness’, ‘retaining representation’ and ‘the material requirements of depiction’, and each is considered through processes of recognition and resemblance. This is informed by writing on painting’s mimetic and materially specific art history, including James Elkins, Michael Podro, Georges Didi-Huberman, W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Baxandall and Jacques Rancière. Likeness is rephrased by a consideration of analogy, and the conceptual testing involved, opening a space between the notion of likeness and visual resemblance. Representation is thought through the processes of correspondence and reiteration, and the associations of both presence and displacement. Depiction is embedded into its material conditions and the circumstances of recognition that evokes. All three terms are considered as key to the constraints between painting and picture, even when functioning as exclusions.
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Imagining a ‘relational’ painting
More LessAbstractThis article presents a discussion around the idea of painting as a ‘relational’ practice, which has evolved from the invited correspondence between Catherine Ferguson (as Painter) and Ken Wilder (as Non-Painter), facilitated by Agnieszka Mlicka. Their responses to envisaging such a relational painting reflect distinct artistic practices and philosophical traditions, which diverge and converge throughout the writing. For the Painter, on the one hand, painting becomes relational by virtue of its life and process, as an autopoietic entity in a dynamic relation with its environment. For the Non-Painter, on the other hand, the very terms relational and autopoiesis are treated with suspicion, in that it is argued that any critically inclined collaborative painting must reveal the actualities of the genesis of a work’s spatial and temporal performance. In juxtaposing these two trajectories through the process of co-responding, an analogy is created to the idea of a relational painting practice as a dynamic process of negotiation. The emerging interface generates an energy that has more significance than the notion of a completed or realized work. Reflecting on this collaborative experiment, this article suggests that the creation of an agonistic space for discourse is fundamental to imagining how a relational painting might unfold.
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Crossing light
By Suling WangAbstractFor this visual essay, Suling Wang’s contribution comprises a series paintings on paper, which are juxtaposed with photographic images of the artist’s native Taiwan, combining gestural mark-making with collage to reflect on themes of cultural identity, location and memory. In particular, notions of abstraction and representation are explored in relation to the changing landscape and the artist’s own personal history of travel and living abroad. The work meditates on the abstraction of the painter’s forms in relation to Chinese landscape painting as well as the role of travel and experience in artistic expression.
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Reviews
Abstract‘Bernice Donszelmann: Descriptor’, Five Years Gallery, London, 6–14 June 2015
‘Emma Talbot: Step Inside Love’, Domo Baal Gallery, London, 24 April–6 June 2015
‘Painting in Time’, The Tetley, Leeds, 3 April–5 July 2015
‘Bridget Riley: The curve paintings 1961–2014’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 13 June–6 September 2015
‘Jacqueline Humphries’, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 11 June–5 October 2015
‘Yves Berger: For Other Eyes’, Art Space Gallery, London, 8 September–16 October 2015
‘Velázquez’, Grand Palais, Paris, 25 March–13 July 2015
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