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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2021
Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 7, Issue 1-2, 2021
Volume 7, Issue 1-2, 2021
- Articles
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Maternity beyond metaphor: Painting, the studio and the lived experience of sexual difference in the work of Virginia Bodman
More LessThis article attends to the practice of painter Virginia Bodman (1954) to illuminate the gap between the operations of the maternal body as a metaphor for painting in phenomenology, and the lived experience of that body inside and outside the painter’s studio. Structured in three sections, it offers close readings of works made by Virginia Bodman over a period of 26 years. Bodman had been a painter of considerable professional standing by the time she became pregnant with her first child in 1988. This article considers the way in which the push and pull of liquid matter reveals a becoming-mother’s negotiation of the transformation of the self and history in paint. In so doing, it mobilizes Griselda Pollock’s (1999) argument that the mother/Other can be a site of political agency. To consider the complex questions of immersivity, professional identity and time in the context of maternal experience is to enable a reappraisal of the radical conceptual value that Elkins (1999) and Merleau-Ponty (1961) assigned to the maternal body as a metaphor of painting and studio practice. This article argues that the tangle of matter, movement and memory in Bodman’s dialogues with Picasso and Vaughan illuminate strategies to overcome this professional displacement.
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Nexus, veil: Robert Ryman and the equivocal spaces of abstraction
By April VirgoeIt is now understood that the two great defining points in the history of western painting – the emergence of illusory space in the Quattrocento and its disavowal in the mid-twentieth century – represent significant shifts in a perpetual tide in which pictorial space is re-invented. Outside of modernist teleology, the ‘abstract’ in painting is a malleable term, denoting a tendency, or a move away from, rather than a polemic against depiction. How productively, then, can notions of pictorial space be mapped between ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’? In this article, I focus on the work of the American painter Robert Ryman (1930–2019). Ryman defined his work as ‘realist’ and deployed a materialism that foregrounded the processes of painting. His paintings are both disarmingly simple and spatially complex, and, despite his disavowal of illusion, this complexity is, paradoxically, concerned with the production of pictorial space. I bring together two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, to address the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings and to suggest that they enter into a negotiation with a perspective that is something very different to a rebuttal. To look at Ryman again in this way is to offer a rethinking of the paradoxical spaces of abstract painting, its past and its present.
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Speculative scholarship: Between text and image
More LessThis experimental text considers the application of painting as a philosophical practice through an inquiry of what it actually means to have knowledge of an artwork. That is, what does it mean to think materially, in Hubert Damisch’s words, ‘what does it mean for a painter to think?’. Within this context emerges a dialogue between the cognitive, the analytic and the poetic, seeking to embody and offer a picture of the experience of the visible. This grows from an interest in the philosophy of perception, specifically engaging current approaches in embodied cognition and blending theory, considering vision and visual perception as an ontologic process. The text presented below seeks to explore the possibilities of carrying over this philosophical terrain to questions of received language, ideas of originality and problems of authorship. This is a painter’s task – an approach to ‘text as image’ – and is not only about devising and exploring a specific format to speak about how painting works but also about staging a compositional technique and textual act of re-production between experimental writing and the material practice of painting. Presenting unorthodox academic writing seeks to situate ideas not only within scholarship but also in how that scholarship might be transmitted effectively.
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- Visual Essay
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Portrait of landscape
More LessThis is a visual conjuring of sensations of pleasure, curiosity, unease, disruption and volatility. A comprehension of interiors, exteriors and their landscapes. Repetition, connection and the macro, micro experience of traversing an environment. Stopping to focus or taking in a wider analysis and how we piece together and digest experience. What we choose to see, how we look and what we edit.
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- Articles
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Shirley Kaneda: Doubled prisms
By David RyanThis article examines the work of Shirley Kaneda, the Korean-Japanese American artist. It discusses various paintings from Kaneda’s output, both from the 1990s and from the last six years, in order to draw out her concerns and intentions. In this light it also explores her statements from articles and interviews in thinking through her intertwining of both theoretical and painterly concerns. It moves from the context of her early work in the Conceptual Abstraction exhibition of 1991 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, to the actual form and procedures that the work implements. Formalism, or post-formalism here, develops the means to deconstruct certain inherited tropes of modernism and provide a new re-formation of them, and here Kaneda draws both on feminist, modernist and poststructuralist ideas. This also has implications for the viewer and how the work frames and proposes material for an encounter with these elements. The bracketing of early and recent work highlights ongoing continuities and differences within Kaneda’s oeuvre.
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Painting as technology: Toolpaths and pathways in Cheyney Thompson’s work
More LessThis article focuses on the experimental painting process of Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975). It is informed by French postmodern theory, principles of colour theory, and includes algorithms developed by the artist himself. Thompson’s practice can be understood as a continuous rumination on technology and the history of technology, as the artist explained in several interviews for this text, which also describes how his themes since c.2006 have been transposed into elaborate practical processes. The concerns and sources for his interrelated sets and series of paintings are wide-ranging, from the relationship between photography, printing and painting, to the Modernist grid, square and monochromy; how labour and time can be measured and mapped; and the role of the artist’s gesture, chance, and the influence of capitalist forces in the production and distribution of art.
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Before and after photography
By David SweetThe challenge posed to nineteenth-century painting is placed in the context of current uncertainties about artificial intelligence. It is argued that at the centre of photography was an ‘artificial retina’, generating a highly unified pictoriality. Impressionism adopts this retinal or optical model. Before photography paintings were organized around perspective, allowing more spatial drama. However, perspective is also an example of artificial intelligence, based on eyesight. Cézanne disrupts the unity of Impressionism reintroducing elements of the pre-photographic, combining two scopic regimes. A feature of this hybrid approach is the diagonal, initially connecting the picture plane to the horizon, but modified in response to the photograph. This can be observed in many works from Cézanne to Matisse and beyond. Further examples of the function of this diagonal are discussed in reference to contemporary works by Tomma Abts, Sharon Hall and Marc Vaux.
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New frontier: Three painters from Shenzhen and their relation with the Hong Kong art market
More LessDrawn towards Hong Kong because of what appears to be a thriving art market, many artists from the People’s Republic of China are now looking towards Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone created nearby in the 1980s, for conducting their practices. Launched as an economic testing ground by Deng Xiaping, Shenzhen is now experiencing new and profound changes. The development of new art institutions has been the reason for the emergence of an art scene that is fostering the creation of original art practices, especially in the field of painting. This article takes as example three practitioners and explains the reasons why they have chosen to live there and how they are negotiating their position from this city within the local art ecology as well as the art market of Hong Kong. The first of these artists, Liang Quan (梁铨), has lived in Shenzhen since the 1990s and is a representative of contemporary forms of literati painting, while the other two, Zhou Li (周力) and Xue Feng (薛峰), are more recent arrivals who are both abstract painters engaging sometimes in the creation of installations and public art projects. To better understand the position of these artists towards the demands of an art market, this article will also explain how the idea of commoditization, which was so repellent to the practitioners of institutional critique in the Euro-American context of the 1960s and 1970s, has not been experienced in Mainland China in quite the same way.
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Contemporary painting, the ‘loop’ and the Chinese context
By Yifei HeThis article explores my own painting practice in relation to my pedagogical experience in both China and the United Kingdom, in order to see how traditional painting and the pedagogy of painting can be repurposed in forms of contemporary painting. Discussion in this article will be based on three examples of my expanded painting practice that engage with the notion of ‘the apparatus’ (Foucault) of painting in relation to the studio, as well as through different materials and mediums: painting, installation, performance, video and so on. The apparatus is, of course, not just about media but about the whole process of painting and its encounter. In these examples of practice, aspects of the apparatus of painting are revisited and re-visioned. Also, these examples demonstrate my thinking around the apparatus of painting’s relation to the loop. Importantly, as a painter, this article offers my practice’s response to the question: how does a contemporary (Chinese) painter go forward in the teaching and making of art? This question is vital, especially when there are (Chinese) traditions and histories that should be acknowledged and drawn on, in order to avoid simply repeating or adopting western modes of art practice.
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- Exhibition Reviews
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