FOIL
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STICKING TO PAINTING
Michael Philipson
For those artists who are enthralled by painting (its histories, processes and materials), who cannot put it down, making paintings now is a process of intense and fundamental questioning. The only question to be incessantly engaged is, what can painting-as-art do now, what are its possibilities for me, is ‘it’ still possible? Theoretical answers are absolutely uninteresting.
As the point of practising art is to produce works not answers the vital responses are the paintings emergent from the quest; and their vitality will lie in the ways they necessarily reveal that, beyond and enveloping questioning, painting is through and through libidinal, sensuous. The one ‘thing’ taken for granted, not put into question, as such in the practice, is the painter’s love of paint(ing). Everything thus turns on the way this love sustains the work and illuminates each painting. This strange, always absolutely specific, fusion of love and questioning, energises the machine of practice, its driven character; it is the generator of qualitative ‘difference’, opening up the possibility of our being taken ‘into’, taken over by, seduced by, the work on its terms. And to enable this take over to take place, our place, we viewers-as-respondents may need to suspend what we have taken for granted about our affection for and ‘knowledge’ of painting and allow ourselves to be taken over by each particular work, to participate in its celebratory search.
Contemporary painting faces specific unavoidable problems arising from the twin contexts of its emergence: ‘internally’ painting’s problem is how to respond to its own past (including a rapidly receding modernism) to show the strength of its continuing commitment to painting-as-art; and holding on to painting specifically may also be complicated by the proliferation of visual forms and media that generate hybrid processes and objects displacing painting and sculpture from their traditional centre ground. Such expansion has already eroded our sense of a privileged centre now that there are many sites of practice held together only by their primary appeal to our feeling eyes. In terms of ‘external’ context, painters have to find ways of holding on to this commitment in the face of predatory organisations that manage the appearance and placement of art in our culture. Necessarily, these managers represent the work on their terms. To make life more difficult the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ intermingle in complex ways (for example in institutions responsible for ‘art’ education).
Like all forms of aesthetic practice now it is painting’s fate on its public appearance to be instantly appropriated and represented by non-painting interests. The institutional complex responsible for and interested in constructing a place for the visual arts has its own goals and does its placing work through the interplay of specialised appropriating discourses. Each interest wants to have (and makes sure it gets) a bit of the action, staking its claim to ‘understand’ art and its needs in idiosyncratic technical terms. They are brilliant at converting art into terms compatible with their own ‘knowledges’ (curatorial, commercial, art historical, educational, journalistic, and so on). Cocooned and permeated by such meaning-machines paintings become reasonable sensible objects accommodatable within the terms of our everyday life, one more group of ‘images’ amongst the uncountable plurality routinely disseminated and consumed by the insatiable spectacular information society. Once in the public arena they are subject to accelerating processes of decay, displacement and disappearance that define the fate of all everyday images.
Trying to real-ise and prolong the possibility of painting’s ‘difference’ and ‘life’ under such conditions is a fraught project. The artist has to become something of a strategist; the questioning that, in part, directs practice is informed by strategies seeking to invest the work with something that may delay appropriation and consumption by the hovering vultures of representation. Resistance to meaning, to commonsense, to the discourses of organised knowledges, orchestrates practice with the aim of a self-witholding, of not giving itself ‘away’ immediately. It wants to keep something (its critically intensive difference) in reserve; and yet, and here is the vital paradox, it needs to appeal directly to us, to gather us within its erotic charge. It would like to work at two irreconcilable speeds, catching us instantly in no time at all, while simultaneously holding itself back for an infinitely slow release. How can painting, committed to its own purity, to being on behalf of nothing but painting (which is thus nothing but its surface appearance) withdraw itself at the same time as it gives itself away? To practice painting now, to paint for the good of painting alone, in the aftermath of the ‘isms’ of a manic modernism, is nothing but a practical working out of the tensions of this paradox.
Perhaps this is what is hinted at in the homonym ‘foil’ collecting these artists’ works. Is the ‘foil’ the leaf that hides the most vulnerable parts? In approaching the work might we need to ask whether the surfaces we see are involved in a rigorously playful self-protection that may foil our efforts to grasp them on our terms, to make them meaning-full? Or perhaps we are being invited to keep our wits about us in a duel with the painting-as-foil, a short blunt sword that cannot harm us because it has no point. Could there be something right there, a foil maybe, at the painting’s surface, which, doubling back, lays false trails, puts us off the scent, while keeping us on the trail? However playfully, with whatever ‘wit’, the practice of painting now makes some kind of baffling work intrinsic to its offer of an aesthetic experience or relation. Mute painting, reliant solely on its visible material means, strives to keep open the possibility of moving us to an absolutely immaterial site aside from meaning and language. Paintings do not mean but they do hope to seduce and illumine. Finding just the means for this (and the just means) is painting’s sole task – a practice of intensive concentration in the service of art’s little nothings.
It seems, then, that painting ‘as such’ today, being always multiple, cannot be gathered within a defining identity or essence; it is always at least a double practice, more than one thing ‘at once’. Thus each painting seeks both to work on behalf of, to exemplify, painting-in-general (the ‘tradition’) and to become absolutely particular (just this unavoidable ‘thing’ confronting us in its ‘justness’). [1] Almost impossible to sustain in all but the very short term and experienced as an unfathomable threat by the meaning –machines, painting risks everything on behalf of this purity, this absolute, this other-to-culture; it knows in advance that from its earliest appearance each painting will be subject to dilution, erosion, loss, adulteration, mutation, as it is hauled back into culture’s baroque folds. For every painter this is the only risk worth taking and the resulting works are bearers of the only promise worth making to a calculative consumptive culture now – to keep open tiny sites where the incalculable may still occur. Such occurrences will, of course, be dependent upon our willingness to place ourselves under the works’ sway and care.
[1] In his explanation of the possibilities for ‘community’ no longer defined and constricted by ‘identity’, Agamben considers, among other things, the ‘example’ and the relation between the general and the particular. His investigations bear directly on how we might reformulate art’s possibilities in the wake of modernity. See Agamben, G, (1993) ‘The Coming Community’, university of Minnesota Press, London.
EDWARD CHELL
Edward’s explorations of how paint’s surface life, its dense ‘thereness’, can be worked to evince its other – absence, disappearance – has moved through a wide range of figuration and forms. Particular objects (architectural structures, a figure, his own figure, a bed) will hold sway for a time, generating variations of an intense de-figuring of the image. His recent paintings refer back to a Xeroxed image he made of archaeological excavations of Trojan ruins.
If archaeology is about making sense of what remains, recovering traces of irretrievable pasts, these paintings pose the question of what remains to painting now of its own pasts. And what is left to painting, they seem to propose, is a kind of archaeology-in-reverse; they use paint, how its own appearance (its coloured surfaces) can make ‘things’ appear before us, to reveal how things may recede, disappear, in the face of all our attempts to grasp and know them. All appearing is marked, haunted, by loss, but while this loss (especially acute in our culture of simulation and the virtual) may provoke a general melancholy, the paintings joyfully assert that nothing ever vanishes completely. The paintings leave us with barely discernible traces of what might just be left (both of ‘reality’ and for painting to do)
We are offered absolutely ‘positive’ surfaces, givens (constructed with a spare palette of warms and cools), that are ‘about’ the indeterminate. Each canvas, to one side of positivity/negativity, becomes a non-site of alterations where the marks are about neither one thing nor another; they play in between coming and going. The painting process itself, an in-mixing of care and accident (draggings, blurrings, rubbings, veilings, driftings, pilings), performs, enacts, this suspension of identity. It gives us a ‘something’ that is simultaneously both ‘not yet’ and ‘always ready’ – a moiré effect, in which things tremble between being here and elsewhere. As respondents we are drawn into vertiginous groundless spaces – the surfacing of a region where, perhaps, the coming-going of language is made visible for us long before the congealing securities of legibility and meaning take us over.
If Bonnard, a particular favourite of the artist, drew and painted the thickness of things emerging into their own ‘atmosphere’, Edward revels in the possibility of painting turning this round and catching things just before they disappear. He wants to draw us into this gap, this rent, where we (and things) can just hang on falteringly, even though we and they are subject to a flux, a metamorphosis, aside from clear directions, from evolution. Paradoxically, offering us this flux through their very stasis and silence, the paintings expose us to a ‘neither-here-nor-there’ where we become stateless persons, for in front of them there is no ‘state’ we can be in or grasp without fixing the unfixable. Painting here becomes an undoing of where we (and the representations upon which we routinely rely) ‘stand’ on things; for the only ‘things’ that ‘stand’ still are the paintings themselves.
See FOIL. An exhibition of Paintings by Derrick Haughton, Kathleen Mullaniff. Eugene Palmer, Edward Chell
Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, Surrey.
Published by FOIL. 1998. isbn. 0 9534066 0 1
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