Principia Aesthetica Philosophia 1992
Artist Statement
"Where is the painting?" is something we might often ask when we go into a gallery or exhibition these days. Has painting disappeared, has it got lost, is it now outside the repertoire of contemporary practice? Or has it simply gotten ahead of our ability to see it? Does it now exist in the form of a visual paradox or some other cryptic 'thing' waiting to be pieced together from various elements scattered around the wall, floor and all the other in between places in an exhibition space where we are not used to looking for signs of painting?
Painting is no longer definable as paint on canvas. It now approaches the immaterial and is more like a force field that binds things together. What it contains might occasionally be paint and canvas but in its most reduced form may simply refer to the act of looking or perceiving things in space. In the 1960Os an internal dynamic in painting drove it into the third dimension where it colonised and claimed the domain that had once belonged solely to sculpture. Since that time painting has become an expanding net that has incorporated many aspects that were previously assigned to photography, applied arts, philosophy and so on.
This kind of expanded painting can be anything attached to a wall, anything contained in a frame, anything object like that has been touched with paint, anything placed one after the other, anything that declares its opposition to painting, anything with a picture plane, anything that makes perception aware of itself, anything that casts a conceptual net across the world of phenomena and experience.
Current Research Painting in an Expanded Field
As an historical term or movement conceptual painting does not exist. I have used it as a convenient term to draw together various artists' work who have contributed to an expansion of the domain of painting. I have taken a generalised overview of 20th century art and edited together various moments in an unhistorical way to say something about painting's response and relationship to other media in the visual arts and outside in the world of information technologies.
In this condensed and shorthand view the story begins with Picasso and Duchamp when they lifted painting out of a thin phenomenal realm and demonstrated that the visual arts has a language and that the significance of a work of art may not lie in its immediate visceral response but in the range of speculations it evokes. Their attempts to go beyond the retina, to chart the fourth dimension was also an attempt at put painting at the service of critical thought.
Later on the minimalists and conceptualists extended the idea of non-visual art so that art would no longer be confined by boundaries, so that in effect painting could shake off its formal limitations and occupy every part of the gallery and the world outside and not be limited to something hanging on the wall. They showed that ideas could frame a work and that seeing was not an unmediated physiological event but was vulnerable to language.
Rather than being the end of painting this work was more about the colonisation of three dimensions by painting. Once painting had occupied the traditional space of sculpture as it did with Burn, Judd and Rauschenberg then neither painting or sculpture would ever be the same again and the boundaries between the two would be very difficult to identify.
An internal logic in this kind of work drove painting into the third dimension where it was no longer a window to another world but instead occupied the same time and space as the viewer who was required to take on an active creative role of producing what was seen.
By taking a broad view conceptual painting could become a kind of painting that moves freely between several dimensions and perceptual regimes. The work of Salle, Dunn and Tillers shows the productive possibilities of not rejecting one kind of space for another but instead playing on a tension or dialectic between objects and images.
The fracturing of the identity and look of painting also seems to coincide with large changes in looking and seeing brought about by mass media technology in the 20th Century. Any metaphorical comparison of the mechanism of sight to the camera obscura has been lost with contemporary computer technology since a single observer no longer governs an ideal viewpoint of the world but is instead dispersed by a dematerialised digital technology through a field of many vantage points.
In my own work layering became a primary device for describing an experience that began with looking at something but which was immediately overlayed with thoughts, memories, wishes, feelings and words. Layering permitted a kind of realism whereby all the unexpected connections and chance rendezvous of thought could be contained in a work or at least allowed to happen at a later stage. Layering also hinted at the techniques of information transmission that arrives by ever increasingly sophisticated methods from the world's proliferating storehouse of information.
Layered images became layers of contesting elements that played on a dialectic or conflict between the images of painting and its object status as a solid thing on the wall. Objects interrupted and extended the surface of painting until it reached an extreme point were its status as object appeared to entirely subsume any relationship to a picture plane. An internal logic based on mapping experiences and events from one dimension to another drove the work from a flat surface into the domain of real objects and the space of the viewer.
This work extends the material realm of painting while affirming and investigating the various methods and theories painters and artists have proposed about the way the world is seen and experienced. Painting came to colonise the space it once simply represented. Even in the absence of paint and canvas what frames the work is the idea or aura of painting.
Non-visual art, non-sculptural sculpture, silent music, wordless poetry, nude fashion, dance without movement were all artistic signals along the way that indicated the kind of consciousness that would be needed for entering a world where physical differences and material conventions would remain in a state of flux and remain responsive to the need for redefinition should a change in the spirit of the times require it.
Référence: http://autonomous.org/soundsite/main.html