Steve Armstrong, The Infinite Choice of Primaries, acrylic, copper circuit board, and linoleum on plywood.
[This is Part 2, Part 1 is here]
I think it would be worthwhile to restate where we are: Self expression is extremely difficult and may even be impossible in any way that is not trivial. Self portraiture is not difficult at all, either in the literal sense or when the viewer notices the unintentional parts of a work. Bad art contains a self-serving component, it isn’t given freely with no strings attached. I regard art as a gift, good art is always given freely, it’s simply there for anyone to notice.
Art-making produces things that take up some space in the world and thus they impinge on us in various ways, and because of this there is a moral component to it as well. Some art forms are more delicate than others, more easily damaged by the misdeeds of the artist. The viewer decides when a moral failure is relevant to a judgment about the work and a factor in that decision has to do with the intimacy and intensity of the imagined relationship between the viewer and the artist who made the work.
So with all of the above in mind, it’s time to consider how looking for intentions while looking at paintings is a practical way to increase the pleasure of art. And this is all about painting because I think of myself as mostly a painter, and this is all about me because I’m the volunteer test case for the secret life of an artist.
To begin, we need to sort out the differences between seeing and reading during the perceptual process. This is somewhat complicated, to the point that it might seem pedantic, but there is a good reason to want to do it. The process provides an opportunity to make better-informed aesthetic decisions, and this will increase the joy of good art as well as the less worthy pleasure of impugning the bad.
It’s plainly obvious that artists want the viewer to have a particular experience even if the viewers are no one other than the artists themselves. Matisse apparently said he painted so he’d have something to look at. I don't know if he actually said that, but I can certainly understand the point of view: It leads to the “artist high” [I have a previous post about that]. Artists want the Artist High, something David Foster Wallace called “the click”(fn8). There’s no better feeling than looking at something you have made and thinking, “This is amazingly good, how did I ever manage to do this?”. That’s the artist’s high. This particular experience will have both seeing and reading components that are related in complicated ways.
An example will be helpful here: There are paintings that use masking tape to produce straight edges and sometimes paint finds its way under the tape making the edges a bit ragged. And sometimes there are painters who don’t have a problem with that seepage, and in fact consider it an enhancement, perhaps because either the process of its making is thereby more apparent, and/or it could be read as a disparagement of skill. To see the leakage as an enhancement is where reading a painting comes in. But besides the reading of a painting, this is also where self-portraiture and self expression come in.
To take things further I need to back up a little and mention facture, impasto, and painterliness. Facture is basically the process involved in the making of something. With painting it specifically refers to the application of the paint and is therefore taken to be related to the degree of smoothness of the painted surface. Ingres’ very smooth paintings apparently have no facture although of course they do have facture because Ingres made them, whereas Van Gogh’s extremely uneven surfaces with their viscous paint showing the marks of its application have lots of facture. Van Gogh’s method of applying paint is called impasto. Impasto is a species of the genus facture.
Painterliness is any quality that causes a viewer to notice the facture. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the term painterliness came into use and it referred to works with lots of obvious facture plus any other qualities that lead one’s attention to the paint itself. The process of viewing art was changing, it was becoming less of a clear window as the glass slowly became more evident. But in this first stage, painterliness was only a different kind of beauty to be appreciated in addition to composition, contrast, colour, or conception. When we move forward to the era of masking tape, rollers, drips, stains, and pours, painterliness becomes laden with subtleties. As a non-art-historian I would peg the masking tape era beginning around 1948 when Barnett Newman started the Onement series.
Barnett Newman, Onement VI, 1953
Things came to the point where a painting with no impasto whatsoever, canvas stained with pigment, was easily seen, or read, as painterly. Clement Greenberg coined the term post-painterly abstraction to refer to artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Jack Bush, and Ellsworth Kelly who worked with little to no impasto, but I would revise Greenberg’s “post” as more specifically, “post - understanding painterliness as just one of the many aspects of the painting itself”. In other words, it isn’t in the painting, it refers to the painter.
Painterliness is any indication of an artist’s intentions. The approval of leaky masking tape, and every other decision a painter makes, are all painterly and easily seen as having facture in its original sense of how the painting was produced. This kind of painterliness refers the viewer back to the artist, and the artist’s intentions. Here we are confronted with self-portraiture and possibly unintentional self expression. I think this also sheds light on the word Expressionism, as it occurs in the name of the art movement Abstract Expressionism.
We read the artist’s intentions while we see the painting. We all become smarty-pants not satisfied to just appreciate the work itself, suspecting that beauty that only resides in the painting is somewhat naive, and instead, we find that many of the more splendid subtleties reside in the artist’s intentions and decisions, and not the painting itself. And at the same time, the skill required to apply the paint is downplayed as a relevant component of its facture. It was Duchamp after all, who proposed that deciding and choosing is the essence of art.
In 1925, during the pre-masking tape era, Paul Klee completed an oil on cardboard painting about fifteen inches square called Ancient Sound, presently in the Kunstsammlung Basel collection. This intense little painting consists of a hand-rendered grid of small rectangles that are arranged by the relative luminescence of their colours so that a figure seems caught in mid-flight towards the viewer as it emerges from a dark ground. The rectangles seem like notes in an orchestral chord with the brightest presently sounding while the dimmer ones are yet to come or retreating into memory. The thought of ancient sound is truly delightful and it reminds me of some lines from “The Seraphim and Cherubim”, a poem by Hans Arp that also references sounds not present, "No one detects now the track of his baby shoes. They left not even a threadlike trace of a tiny hiking-song in the air."(fn9)
The thought of things past, things lost to us, can create dire thoughts about our own mortality and our ability to know anything. Fortunately, these sorts of ideas can be dispassionately observed in oneself without jumping to unfounded conclusions either religious or epistemological. They can just be understood as interesting thoughts without personal implications. This is how our worries can become fodder for art. My key, assuming I have the right one, is to not identify myself with the ideas and beliefs I notice floating by in my mind. I think Klee and Arp did something similar since they seem to have transformed wistfulness, anxiety, and the poignant dreams they engender into touching work. The self-portrait that Klee is showing me is a playful, modest person who, like Arp, takes great pleasure in poignancy. My imaginary Klee has charmed me by making sound, and perhaps time, almost visible. It's a beautiful painting. It’s a beautiful painting without its title, but knowing it is ancient sound could make me weep.
Like Klee, sometimes a painter paints in a particular way just to make a painting that is painted in exactly that particular way. These kinds of paintings are meant to look just as they look. This is very straightforward - the painting that is right in front of me is the thing intended to be seen. It is not meant to be seen through to the imaginary artist.
Some straightforward paintings are about the paint itself, or the support for that paint (formal concerns), but I find it much more interesting when straightforward paintings are also about something else as well, ancient sound for example. This is often referred to as "content", but “content” implies an unfortunate metaphor: Content is not inside a painting, content is the painting perceived. The painting is the thing to be seen in spite of the fact that my enthusiasm led me to see Klee himself on the other side of the work. I can't help it, the experience of good art is always visceral just like love. I want the smell and touch of the artist. It’s a matter of community, we reach out to look for others and to share insights. Things would be awfully lonely if this weren’t the case. On the other hand, it’s also a matter of body, and as a body myself, I also know when something stinks.
In the masking tape era, there was a slow emergence of ever less straightforward paintings that required ever less seeing and ever more reading, and through this process the conceptual painting was born. Conceptual painting is not straightforward: It is painting that is presented as painting in order to make a point about something unrelated, something that is not there to be seen in the painting itself. It might be something like, "The person who made this painting has a new and better understanding of some particular strand in the history of art", "the history of art such that this painting is a part of it", "the history of art such that this painting is a clean break with it", or "an appropriate stance on a burning issue of the day". These kinds of paintings are conceptual paintings.
Of course, there is room for things like this: There are unfamiliar ways to see and understand, and from time to time, art and artists will reflect these new ways of seeing. But this is the full extent of my qualifications because art’s the thing, not the artist. But an artist can also generate a new way of seeing while also remaining a straightforward painter. For example, Anne Truitt has given us a new way of seeing. She is a painter and sculptor, although I don’t think she made painted sculptures, instead, I see them as free-standing paintings.
Painting is all about surface and Truitt’s ‘sculptures’ seem to me to be all about their surface regardless of their shape, and regardless of whether the viewer can move around them. This is a profound shift in the understanding of what a painting is and it also clearly declares that surface, the appearance of a thing, is the only information we can access. Here’s a 1965 quote from annetruitt.org, "What is important to me is not geometrical shape per se, or color per se, but to make a relationship between shape and color which feels to me like my experience. To make what feels to me like reality.” There’s nothing conceptual about this, it’s about seeing what can be seen.
A conceptual painting is an object that is presented as if it were a painting. Thus, a stretched canvas that has had paint applied to it by a human, then hung on a wall so people can look at it, could well not be a painting at all, while at the same time there are works that don’t involve paint and/or humans that are quite legitimately called paintings. In the mid 1980’s Rosemarie Troekel mounted material produced by industrial knitting machines on stretchers and hung them on the wall. I don’t have a problem calling them paintings. There have also been a couple of chimpanzees who painted, and some of those paintings are quite interesting. Further, in 1980 Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, working as the collective called Art & Language, made a series of paintings called Portrait of V.I. Lenin with Cap, in the Style of Jackson Pollock. It is impossible to see these objects as paintings because to do so would force a discussion about plagiarism. But of course it’s not plagiarism, it’s not painting, it’s conceptual art. When I first saw them I thought they were funny, and very interesting. They make the case that a conceptual painter not a painter at all, and a conceptual painting not a painting in spite of the fact it looks like one.
Here are some final examples that will hopefully clarify my distinction between conceptual and straightforward paintings. In my opinion, Damien Hirst's spot paintings are fine examples of conceptual paintings. Here’s a quote from damienhirst.com:
The spot paintings vary in size from a 40 foot canvas containing spots of 1 inch, ‘Iodomrthane-13c’ (1999 - 2000), to ‘Erbium Oxide’ (2009), which has only four 60 inch spots, to ‘L-Isoleucinol’ (2008 - 2011), which measures ten by sixteen inches and contains 25,781 one millimeter spots. Their titles are taken arbitrarily from the chemical company Sigma-Aldrich’s catalogue ‘Biochemicals for Research and Diagnostic Reagents’, a book Hirst stumbled across in the early 1990’s. The grid formula within the ‘Pharmaceutical’ paintings was the basis for an endless series. Over the last 24 years, Hirst has produced on average 60 spot paintings a year.
I feel confident that Hirst's Spot Paintings, which were the product of numerous hired assistants, are conceptual paintings that owe a large debt to Warhol and his concept of the art studio as a “Factory”. And like Warhol, these paintings also disparage skill, an issue mentioned above in my discussion of masking tape. Hirst is quoted on the same website, “Any physical evidence of human intervention – such as the compass point left at the centre of each spot – was removed, until the works appeared to have been constructed mechanically, or “by a person trying to paint like a machine””.
I don’t think there is anything to be gained by merely looking at these paintings, just like all conceptual art, knowing about them is sufficient. I think the spot paintings are primarily about how art making is a kind of fabricating and art is a kind of money. This is not a terribly novel idea - the idea of the cultural commodity has been nagging the conscience of artists for quite a while. Reinhardt, mentioned previously, [part 1] had a lot to say about that - those ambivalent feelings of many artists about their understanding that art is something that can be bought and sold.
From a purely formal point of view, Hirst’s spot paintings follow a path from the invention of Ben-Day dots by Benjamin Henry Day in 1879 through to Roy Lichtenstein’s interest in the use of those dots in comic books. And from the theoretical context that contemporary artists find themselves steeped in, I catch a scent of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. To be brutal, in spite of the fact that Hirst’s spot paintings exist in a number of interesting contexts, the conceptual, formal, and theoretical, I think they are mediocre paintings. I probably would not have noticed them at all, except for all the press they generated, and to a large extent that press was generated because of the huge sums of money that moved around on account of them. If Hirst weren’t famous and I encountered a gallery-full of his spot paintings, I’d give them a minute or two and ultimately decide there’s not much to see. If there were only one on display in a group exhibition I’d probably just walk by, my peripheral vision having given me enough information. Ultimately, I would only consider the spot paintings bad if I were viewing them through a lens of envy for all the money they can be turned into. They’re not bad, they’re boring.
The counterpoint to conceptual painting is Robert Fones who also sees something interesting about spots and dots.
Here's Fones from the Coach House books website:
WONDER BREAD
I have always liked the simplicity of the six dots in the Wonder Bread logo and its evocation, in product design, of Modernist principles. I remember seeing the logo as a child and associating it with one of my favorite comic book characters, Little Dot, a girl who was obsessed with dots and collected them the way other people might collect coins or butterflies. To construct this painting I found a Wonder Bread logo on the side of a truck and photographed it in order to find out how many different sizes of dots there were, and how the dots were arranged. […] Once I positioned an altered configuration of dots on the face, I extended them back in perspective as if they were solid material. I thought of the eyes and tongue as planes of material cutting through the solid logo, hence whatever color they sliced through was carried forward or backward in pictorial space. The head ended up looking clown-like but rather tragic, as if it was unaware of the dots on its face.
Nice how he used the word ‘sliced’ like a loaf of bread. I see more in Fones' piece than he has mentioned. He mostly described the imaginative play that artists enjoy so much, "I extended them [the dots] back in perspective as if they were a solid material". Fones' playful attitude towards his work seems similar to that of Paul Klee. But besides this, I see a metaphor for perception. The spots to be perceived by the face are on the outer surface of that face, and they leak in through its sense organ holes. It says to me that the things I perceive are not "over there", I am actually touched by everything. There is no empty space between me and the things I experience. On my part of course, this is just more of that imaginative play that artists enjoy so much. It's also worth noting that Klee's "Ancient Sound" is also a reference to perception.
I can’t imagine any discussion of spots and dots that doesn’t mention Georges Seurat and Paul Signac who together devised Pointillism around 1886. I suspect the Pointillists were researching the limits of the relationship between granularity, or the discrete, and continuousness as it applies to perception. There also might be a reason why spots and dots seem to lend themselves so well to meditations on perception. Henri Bergson published Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness in 1910 which also considers the issues of the discrete versus the continuous. It was based on his doctoral dissertation of 1889, and for what it's worth, this was contemporary with the two painters. I’m not claiming Seurat and Signac were familiar with a doctoral dissertation in philosophy from 1889, and I’m also not claiming that Bergson was aware of Pointillism, although this second possibility is the more likely.
Instead, it’s interesting to note that both a philosophical theory and a method of painting, both of which examined the relation between the discrete and the continuous in terms of the actual and the apparent, turned up shortly after the invention of Ben-Day dots. In my personal experience, there do not seem to be any spaces and gaps in my perception, at least none that have come to my attention. I simply notice that the passing of time and the infinite gradations of colour and luminosity are immediately seen as continuous. I expect Seurat and Signac found it interesting that the resolution of our perception, the finest detail we can perceive, suggested the possibility that a continuum is an illusion. They weren’t making conceptual paintings - just like Anne Truitt, they wanted to see what they could see.
There is an infinity of numbers between one and two, this is a thought that doesn’t bother me at all. It is both a feeble understanding of a continuum and a delightful thought about infinitesimals. But then there is also the hypothesis of ancient Greek philosopher and medical theorist Asclepiades of Bythnia (2nd c. BCE) who posited that atomic particles can be divided into an infinite number of pieces.(fn10) I have to say, infinitely divisible matter is certainly a wonderful idea to behold: discrete units of stuff all the way down with no hypothesis as to what stuff might be under those circumstances. I find that funny like a portrait of Lenin in the style of Jackson Pollock. And there’s probably a Doctoral dissertation to be found in all this: Bergson, Pointillism, and Benjamin Henry Day Jr., plus granularity, perception, and art. That’s a book I’d happily read.
Image at top, Steve Armstrong, The Infinite Choice of Primaries is a scan of an out of focus slide. I can't find the piece at the moment. I hope it turns up so I can re-photograph it, measure it, and confirm the date (somewhere around 1993 I think).
I love footnotes. They feel anachronistic don’t they? But they also point the way to BAI facts (Before Artificial Intelligence). These are things that were said.