Research: What exactly is painting?
When we think of painting, what do we imagine. What are the constituent parts that go towards making the event of painting, or result in certain actions and procedures?
Is medium specifity a factor, does that matter?
Do we have to see something presented on a canvas? The ‘pure form’ as Clement Greenburg would have us believe?
Or can we paint with food or light? Bin bags,clothing, parked cars?
Over the course of this year, these are some of the questions my work will explore. If art is a representation of the real, what cultural and political, social and technological influences form upon the not only the real, but what exists beyond the real. And what is it as an artist am I responding to? Where does my work reside? what compels me to create or paint.
Using a mix of philosophical discourse and art theory, the unfolding development of my practice will reside in philosophical meaning explored through trying to find oppositions and tensions, not only through my own subjectivities but also as a way to objectively give viewer a seat at the table in the discussion of what is apparent but also hidden within the work on display.
Firstly,let’s look at the physical nature of painting. What is it to enact painting? It’s a movement, right?
Your hand moves towards a pallet, a substance, some matter. You’re standing, or sitting, or swinging, whilst strapped in a harness, in a pendular motion (I am thinking of The Big Lebowski).
You’re holding a brush, moving matter from one position, plane, surface, to another. Making decisions as you try to capture what it is you are trying to recreate, delineate or imbue into the outcome. So, could we say it’s about points of arrival?
Let us park that for a moment and come back to that.
We can identify that there is a modicum of cause and effect in the process, right? Something I do or commit to produces a result, whether its transient or indelible, deliberate or accidental.
How about the word paint?
'What it that? Let’s start with its etymology. [1] According to Collins and Etymonline, the base of its ‘proto Indian root meaning’ *peig, is to ‘cut or mark by incision’.[2]
This leads us to the Latin derivative, ‘pingere’, [3] "to embroider, tattoo, paint, picture”. [4]
Example: ME peinten peint, pp. of peindre L pingere, to paint, embroider IE base *peig-, to mark by scratching or coloring. Greek pikros, sharp, OE fah, stained; (sense 12) the practice of painting the area in a contrasting color.
So, already we have some kind of back story based in movement, a physical action. But painting is so much more no?
Making the mark, sits somewhere in a wider, unfolding story that precedes the action of mark making and continues on
way after. As was highlighted by Martin Kippenburger, there is a “whole network” [5] to consider. Could one of these considerations take the form of the gallery, a sketch pad, a muse, curation, the list presents us with ways of looking at what painting is, way beyond some of the formal traditions of painting.
In an interview with Melvin Bragg, Francis bacon spoke of what it was to make a mark. It was in response to Bragg asking Bacon why he painted on the un-primed side of the canvas.
Bacon replied, “with that its there! Its indelibly made”. He goes on to say that, and at this point he refers mark making to painting a wall, when making that first mark “where the brush makes that mark, there’s a vitality”.[6]
If we take this idea of execution, exactitude, and apply the same process to creating stark, deliberate, visualisations, and like Bacon, letting chance and risk mixed with an intuitive experimental approach, guide our ‘approach’ to painting, can we paint without the use of paint? How can we paint without painting?
Of course, I am not the first artist to ask this question, exemplified through various exhibitions that have tackled this question, with varied and interesting discourse and outcome as a result. Even if an artist considers themselves painterly, it’s interesting to see, what a short internet search throws up, for the purpose of finding examples of how the ‘process’ has produced a response to the painting without painting question.
Two examples my research came across are Henry Krokatsis’s Step Out of the Sunshine, 2011, (fig. 1) from
a 2011-12 show titled, ‘Painting Without Paint’ and, Hillary Harnischferger’s Black Eye 2014, (fig. 2) exhibitedat the Richard and Dolly Maas Gallery in a 2016 show titled ‘Physical Painting’
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Both exhibit in some way evidence of process, adaption and yet still adopt the traditional idea of an object that hangs on a wall. But what if we took that further?
What if the wall did not exist? Do all paintings have to hang? Why do we even have to think of them in this space at all? What does this removal, or reduction re-introduce? Can we hang a film? Sculpture?
Immediately, many works come to mind that answer this question, Bruce Nauman’ s suspended steel girders (Fig.3) or Steve McQueen’s helicopter shots of the Statue of Liberty (Fig. 4), both recently curated as suspended features in their physical space, yet not paintings.
Maybe, because the painting came before conceptual art, and video art, we still feel an affinity to adhere to a tradition, almost as if hanging a painting is a homage to the art of hanging paintings? Could such a notion be true, valid and or conceptual in itself as a proposition.
Stuart Hall, in introduction to his book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, delineates how we construct meaning out of language.
In language, we use signs and symbols – whether they are sounds, written words, electronically produced images, musical notes, even objects – to stand for or represent to other people our concepts, ideas and feelings. Language is one ‘media’ through which thoughts, ideas and feelings are represented in a culture. Representation through language is therefore central to the processes by which meaning is produced.”
It’s interesting that Hall sees objects almost as an addition to his list of modes of production. But using the object as representation may help my work veer away from mere mimesis.
Arthur C. Danto in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, His chapter, explores the spaces between object and reality. Constructing the that for theatre to succeed there needs to be a space between what is real and what is represented.
[…] In seeing the appearance one was seeing the thing – and in the other the relation was that of designation, a gap having opened up, so to speak, between the reality and its representations, comparable to, if not indeed the same gap that is perceived to separate language from reality when the former is understood in its representational, or descriptive, capacity.
Knowing my practice resides in these spaces, whether relational, relative or similar, it is important to explore the spaces where the work may fall down or be misunderstood as well as where any production may be grounded.
[1] Etymonline, Paint, (n.d.), <https://www.etymonline.com/word/paint> [accessed 13/10/20]
[2] Ibid.
[3] Collins, Paint, (n.d.), <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/paint> [accessed 13/10/20]
[4] Etymonline, Paint, (n.d.), <https://www.etymonline.com/word/paint> [accessed 13/10/20]
[5] David Joselit, ‘Painting beside Itself’, October, 130 (2009), 125–34. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368572 > [accessed 13/10/20]
[6] Francis Bacon, ‘Francis Bacon - The South Bank Show (Portrait 1985) dt. UT’, The South Bank Show, (London Weekend television 1985), <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Le9zFw-uc> [accessed 16/10/20]
[7] Stuart Hall, (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, (London: Sage Publications, 1997) p. 1.
[8] Arthur C. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge MA: harvard University Press, 1981) p. 21