Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2019

The first five images are collages-montages where I use collage as at once a technique of the construction of form but also as a mode of inquiry on what is in the process of being made and that the viewer is in the process of seeing (future perfect). The last five images are taken from a diagram that I began in 1994 whose task is a simple classification articulating a chronological series of paintings with the syntagma of written propositions (conceptual, metaphoric or historical) and historical works – drawn, painted or sculpted. Since then, the diagram has been developed in a specific way; it has become a dispositif not only because new columns of time have been added but especially because the interaction between the written and the painted leads to a certain number of disruptions, in such a way that the dispositif has substituted its own specific temporal and paradoxical propositions for the chronological fatality of origins.

In the introduction to Painting as Model, Yve-Alain Bois attempted to provide for his readers ‘a map of the field of forces against which (or with which)’ the essays had been written. If those essays continue to hold an important position within the discipline today, it is nonetheless the case that the ‘field of forces’ from (and in opposition to) which they draw their significance has subtly but noticeably changed. This article looks in some detail at several of the most prominent published reviews of Painting as Model, discusses how the art-historical terrain has shifted since 1990 and then how those differences both enable and require us to reconceive the nature of Bois’s project. The phrase ‘materialist formalism’, which he originally used to describe his approach, arguably carries different connotations now than it did a quarter century ago, with the result that we might be better served by describing Bois’s work in other terms – terms that would place a greater premium on the descriptive nature of his criticism and the forms of resistance that it enacts.

While most of Hubert Damisch’s major books have been made available in English since the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ review essay ‘Painting as model’, it nonetheless remains a shame that Fenêtre Jaune Cadmium (Damisch 1984) – the subject of Bois’ review – has not been translated. Although best known as a specialist in Renaissance art, the essays of Fenêtre show how Damisch’s distinct art-theoretical project emerges from his early writings on modernist and post-war painting, phenomenology and structuralism. This paper argues that Damisch’s writings and Bois’ essay serves as a crux for the October journal. October was at the forefront of the critique against painting during the early 1980s, but the publication of ‘Painting as model’ suggests a sea change in the journal. I shall examine how Damisch’s entwining of phenomenology and structuralism, as a model for October that helped it revise its understanding of painting and for rethinking the relationship between art history and art criticism.

Y.-A. Bois has the merit of having opened the way to an understanding of Matisse’s revolution in the matter of colour – namely that relations between colours are above all relations of quantity, and that these quantitative relations determine, differentially, their qualities. But for him, these relations of quantity are merely a question of their reciprocal partitioning of surfaces, that is to say of drawing. For us, colour is in principle a relation not between pure quantities of inert surfaces but between their reciprocal intensities. And these intensities are not to be understood in terms of pure picturality. Indeed, the most radical advance Matisse made in his art was to open up an experimentation with the becoming-life of art: an art which, from this point on, would no longer be a matter of aesthetics, but instead of the all-around construction of an aisthesis expressing what Matisse called an ‘energetic feeling of life’. This implied a veritable becoming-other of painting which would prompt him, without exiting painting, to make painting itself exit by removing the borders between painting and its environing milieu so that his construction works directly flush to the architectural site, with the intention of constructing, together with it, a milieu of life from which his painting must not cut itself off by making itself image – and in this proviso lies the whole force and the difficulty of Matisse. We tackle this question through an analysis and comparison of his two great mural paintings entitled The Dance (1931–33).

In this article the question posed by Yve-Alain Bois via Hubert Damisch in Painting as Model, ‘what is the mode of thought of which painting is the stake?’ (1990) is shifted to what is the mode of attention? Informed by current cognitive and neuropsychological research, paintings combative art history is assessed through the lens of attention. The unravelling of modernist painting is proposed as a conflict between models of attention, and divergent attentional expectations. Modernist values of immediacy, presentness, wholeness are considered conditions of an ideal attentional experience, one that attempts to hold back a partial, fragmented and distracted counter experience of modernity. Painting as Model argued for painting’s specificity, pulling away from a formalism that reduces painting to the visual, and theoretical structures that bypass the made object. This article proposes an attentional-specificity for painting; the limits of attentional capacity, distinctions between focused, distributed and divided attention correlating with the cognitive complexity held by the structural, spatial and material conditions of painting.

In his essay on Barnett Newman in Painting as Model, ‘Perceiving Newman’, Bois accounts for the appeal of Newman’s address by positing that the artist’s work invokes ‘a world-for-us, neither the “objective” world described by mathematics or physics nor a kind of mythic space that one could [...] thematise with symbols and ideographs’. However, in this article it is contended that this ‘world-for-us’ is prefigured through the experience of decisive otherness. While Bois cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early opus Phenomenoloy of Perception in ‘Perceiving Newman’, in this article Merleau-Ponty’s late writing is read via the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno to discuss how the in-itselfness of Newman’s art bindingly engages elements of experience that capitalism dismisses in favour of profit as the fundamental determinant of everyday life.

This essay reflects on Yve-Alain Bois’ proposition that Władysław Strzemiński’s Unist paintings and texts were ‘out of sync’. First, I consider whether Strzemiński’s writings published between 1923 and 1936 were ‘singularly consistent’, as Bois suggests. I focus on the selected untranslated mid-1930s writings, in relation to Unist Composition 14 (1934) and Seascape (1934). I proceed to flesh out the distinct ways in which Strzemiński theorized painterly abstraction at that point, in relation to synthesis of visual data, rather than formal self-sufficiency proposed earlier in Unism in Painting (1928). I draw on research by Leszek Brogowski (2001), Grzegorz Sztabiński (2006) and Paulina Korpal-Jakubiec (2010). I argue that the shift in Strzemiński’s theoretical framework illuminates his multiple pictorial outputs during the 1930s. The emerging preoccupation with vision evident in the mid-1930s texts clearly forecasts Strzemiński’s post-war work. This challenges a reading of Unist Composition 14 (1934) as the most accomplished painterly articulation of the theory of Unism. Finally, I suggest that the dual model of painterly abstraction emerging from this study is relevant to the current critical debates on abstract painting.

When Gabriel Orozco began painting in the mid-2000s he did so via a turn to non-compositional strategies of making – to painting by algorithm, on the one hand, and painting by appropriation on the other. Work in this vein included his rule-based ‘Samurai Tree’ series and a series of pixelated images he calls the ‘Particle Paintings’. This turn in Orozco’s practice served as the point of departure for an exhibition investigating the legacy of modernist painting techniques in artwork articulated in and through digital and computer technology. In addition to two works by Orozco (Pollock’s Drip Grid, 2011, a pixelated detail of Jackson Pollock’s Number 8, 1949, and an animation from his ‘Samurai Tree’ series), the exhibition featured work by six contemporary artists, all of which were produced in the last year. Orozco’s work, the oldest in the show, set the terms of the investigation and provided a critically established frame for the otherwise brand new work on display. This article describes the dual art historical stakes – deskilled non-compositional modernist strategies and reskilled computer art – of the exhibition that resulted.

‘Mindy Lee & J.A.L.-B.’, Griffin Gallery Perimeter Space, London, 18 January–23 February 2018

‘Navigation Charts: Lubaina Himid’, Spike Island, Bristol, 20 January–26 March 2017