Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2018

Melissa Gordon’s paintings and silkscreens deal with the relation of a body to paint. Her paintings often use as subject matter the material processes of a studio practice. In an ongoing series titled ‘Material Evidence’ she paints reproductions of details of studio surfaces: walls where brushes are wiped, floors with paint spills and tables where colours are mixed. These are painted in pairs and groups with photographic relations to each other such as zooms, crops and pans with repeats and overlaps.

In this visual essay Gordon presents a new body of work made specifically for the Journal of Contemporary Painting entitled Joke Gestures (Make a Mess, Clean it Up). Each piece is made by cleaning a specific surface – a table, a floor of a room, a kitchen counter, etc. These shapes retain their architectural details, showing the edges and gaps created by the negative space of furniture, sinks, toilets, etc. Paint is poured on plastic sheets covering the surface and then the gestures are made by ‘cleaning up’ the mess with sponges, brooms and mops. The plastic remnant is then exposed directly to light onto a silkscreen, which in printing produces a painterly ‘image’ of the act of cleaning. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art Manifesto 1969! is re-printed to draw attention to the dichotomy that Ukeles sets out between the act of maintenance and production in art and exhibition. Ukeles’ text’s poignancy and humour in a contemporary discourse around the ‘invisibility’ of labour also sets a stage for Gordon’s practice, which is engaged in a feminist discourse: to make abstraction through the bodily acts of maintenance (and through the emergence of the ‘invisible’ image in a photographic medium such as silkscreen) as a humorous take on contemporary painting discourse on authorship, abstraction and vitality.

This text reproduces the lecture on Michael Simpson’s Leper Squint Paintings that was delivered as part of the Culture & Psychoanalysis Seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, in October 2016. The lecture came in celebration of Squint (19), which, three months previously, had been selected as the winner of the John Moores Painting Prize. The Journal of Contemporary Painting is printing this text following Simpson’s solo show at Blain|Southern Berlin in September 2017.

There is an ongoing revaluation of Pierre Bonnard, beginning with a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1984 and witnessed most recently in ‘Pierre Bonnard; Painting Arcadia’ at the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco 2016. The resulting body of literature, from reviews to catalogue essays, operates to subsume Bonnard within the modernist canon. However, the gender ambiguities in Bonnard’s practice problematize these attempts to read his paintings using modernist tropes. In particular, his depiction of his wife Marthe Bonnard in the bathtub does not fit easily within the genre of ‘the bather’. Across the Bonnard literature there has been the occultation of a specific woman (Marthe), replacing her with the Ophelia stereotype through an extension of Toril Moi’s ‘death dealing’ binarism. As a consequence of reiterated speculation regarding Marthe’s mental health she continues to be characterized as the neurotic woman disintegrating in the bath/sarcophagus. This article argues that the Bonnard literature creates a deathly and deadly porous woman. Reviewing the weight of gendered metaphoric language the article will offer a reading of the bath series and Bonnard’s late interiors based on the recognition of his difference – a difference that ruptures genre.

In this conversation American painter David Schutter and the author discuss key aspects of Schutter’s work. Schutter (born 1974), whose work makes reference to major European painting collections, explores in his work the relation to tradition and repetition of artistic conventions. His work, presented at ‘Documenta 14’ (2017), often employs strategies of radical limitation of the colour scheme, and restriction of visibility, sometimes blackening out the image plane altogether. This raises questions about the detachment from the referent object, self-reflexivity and the trope of unrepresentable in contemporary painting in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The conversation will further focus on ways Schutter’s work transgresses from a narrow mimetic framework by mitigating in his paintings the difference between original and double and by employing diminished clarity and ambiguity in his work.

During the 1960s British artists were aware of Minimalism’s sculptural and materialist questioning of relational form, and of an American painterly response to this radical aesthetic challenge. The resulting critique of painting’s internal compositional effect of ‘containing’ relational ideas, its problems with illusion and questions about ‘objecthood’ continue to inflect painting as abstract practice. Leapman responds to the rigours of developing a philosophical minimal-materialist practice by exploring various propositions about how process, surface, colour, can be wrought into a painterly motif without disrupting attention to the overall grasp of painted surface. The immediate sensation of painting’s objecthood in Leapman’s work is predicated on binding colour specifically to surface rather than to compositional or relational device. Colour is methodically dispersed across the surface of the painting, registering interest in light, its physics or substance. The impact on the viewer of dynamic warm/cool tonal intervals, organized through different processual concerns at different stages in development of Leapman’s work creates an affective timing in colour’s reception, making real-time optical demands on the viewer as they move around the paintings. The results retain sensitivity to pace and touch, bringing psychological sense to defining resolution.

This article will explore three parasitical terms – mooch, commensal and mutualist – as models that can be applied to recent instances of contemporary painting practices that use historical painting as a catalyst for new works. There will be a brief introduction to the terminology of the parasite, the conceptual position of the parasitical painter and to Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite. The research is driven by the perspective of the author’s painting practice, which will be discussed, alongside an analysis of Pavel Büchler, Yelena Popova and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s work, in relation to different types of parasitical painting practices. Artists such as those explored in this text have reached beyond established notions of appropriation to use existing paintings as the primary material in their work. The act of doing something to existing paintings opens up questions over value, re-imag(in)ing, distortion, re-use, rejuvenation, re-evaluation and originality, among many others. The article closes with speculations for future investigation through notions of interrupting the interrupter and the switching of roles from the influenced to the influencer.

This article takes at its cue the 1969 decision of the John Moores Liverpool Painting Prize and exhibition to exclude works projecting more than six inches out of the wall. The refusal to include British contemporary pictorial explorations that expanded beyond the frame of the canvas at the time can be seen as a conservative stance. However, it also paved the way for the exhibition’s subsequent showcasing of the specific problems located within the internal space and constraints of the canvas, in an epoch that heralded the medium’s obsolescence. First, we look at the relation between painting and sculpture in the first years of the biannual prize, when an independent sculpture section attested to latent concerns about the international standing of British arts. We then focus on the 1969 John Moores’ exhibition that provides a unique perspective into the radical changes occurring in art practices in Britain at the time. Finally, we evoke a range of pictorial practices displayed at the John Moores in the 1970s, which are described as articulating a turn ‘within itself’, furthering an investigation into a range of specific aesthetic problems posed by the format of the canvas at the time.

Maria Tomasula’s oil panel still lifes evoke European painting tradition in subject and in style, but the artist also referred to her Mexican Catholic upbringing as a major source of her art. This article discusses the syncretic nature of her works that are embedded in both European and Mexican traditions. It traces the symbolic use of skulls in the European Catholic teachings and in the indigenous Mesoamerican practices. It also relates her images to the altar offerings that are integral part of Mexican and Mexican American experience. As such, her art represents a more expansive case of Latino/a art and of contemporary American art as called for by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.

New forms of technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) bring visible changes to the temporal-spatial structures used to represent information and contribute towards a rethinking of the vocabularies of spatiality and spatial experience in painting practice. The History of Painting encompasses a range of techniques intended to create visual 3D illusions from a 2D plane. Virtual technologies present an opportunity to rethink the conventional structures and materials in the discipline of painting, forcing a reconsideration of paintings in, and as, space to be explored. VR painting app, Tilt Brush, enables users to create 3D imagery via a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting, materializing a range of brushes, colours and paint effects. Tilt Brush paintings call not only on different making practices but also means of viewing and reading. In this article I draw on Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to interrogate how time and space are arranged to constitute the practice of Tilt Brush painting and as a means to understanding the experience of a VR canvas as a space existing both outside and inside a tangible environment. Rethinking notions of time and space in and around VR painting presents the opportunity to disrupt a representational logic and to consider the embodied relationship of painter to painting as a means of producing and probing the threshold between the physical and the virtual in VR painting.

‘Kerry James Marshall: Mastry’, The Met Breuer, New York, 25 October 2016–29 January 2017