Thomas Ruff, phg.01, 2012. Chromogenic print from the Photograms series.

Thomas Ruff, Zycles 3080, 2009. Made with Cinema 4D software.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Thomas Ruff: ma.r.s.08, 2010.

Ruff takes the NASA generated imagery and effectively “colorizes” the images himself, much as Ted Turner did some years ago with black and white movies. This lends a surreal, eerie and fictional quality to the images, as the color is quite literally ‘added’ after the fact, and not simply tuned or adjusted.

‘It is maybe because photography has been misused such a lot that I think you have to be very careful when you’re looking at a photograph. You always have to know the conditions under which it has been made – because otherwise you cannot read it, or you could misunderstand it, or the image can be misused. Since photography is such a realistic medium, it pretends that everything you’re looking at was in front of the camera. But in the meantime it wasn’t.’          -Thomas Ruff

If photography pretends to show us reality, Ruff delights in showing us the deception behind it, almost as a kind of Penn & Teller figure, eager to pull back the curtain on the manipulations in his process.

Thomas Ruff, Andere Portrait, 1985.

One of Ruff’s lesser hailed but brilliant projects is his series of Anderes portraits. Using an analog machine Berlin police used in the 1970′s to create composite pictures of witness descriptions, Ruff reconstructed artificial faces, mixing two faces at a time, male with male, male with female.

Ruff’s photographs have lost their innocence. Their new-found authenticity, if they have one, is in a pre-arranged reality true to Ruff’s vision of it. He considers himself an investigator of the medium.

His photograms series, currently up at Zwirner gallery, turns this well known photographic tradition on its head, making them digital, multiple, and enlarging them to gigantic sizes.

Formerly one of the most ‘handmade’ of mediums, made literally by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them without a camera (to great effect by masters like Maholy-Nagy or Man Ray), Ruff’s illusory depths here are created entirely in computer via a ‘virtual darkroom’ that employs lighting effects and simulated objects.

Thomas Ruff, r.phg.03, 2012. Chromogenic print.

Ruff’s work is a repeated exercise in a technology mediated vision, where process is unavoidable. And yet, it is, in the end, as always, a promise.

New technology promises us that it will allow us to see new kinds of images – and that the images made with these processes will be inherently new, exciting, significant. And that these images will be as good, if not better? than the old-fashioned handmade.

The digital may indeed yet fulfill all of these promises. Or it may not. Interestingly, much of Ruff’s latest work is so quite literally computer generated that some of his projects could technically be thought of as more “computer illustration” than photography. For Ruff’s “zycles” and photograms, (unlike his colorized MA.R.S pictures for example), have no actual counterpart in any kind of reality.

For me, the most troubling aspect of this technological promise is the degree (or not) to which such processes can still project at least a modicum level of humanity, for that in the end, is the eternal question. Do computer generated images eventually throw out the baby with the bathwater? Do they somehow lose their humanity in the process? At present this is still unclear.


The machine made image is here. And it is here to stay – that is unavoidable. Someday, as artificial intelligence experts think , we may even have autonomous AI’s, specially designed ‘artistic’ programs, that will create works of art for us all by themselves.

But whether these computer generated forms can still teach us something about ourselves? or somehow convey human passions, human concerns, human ambitions? That is another matter. Or if these new processes, now stripped of their humanity, just provide us back with the cold, logical stare of an algorithm, a computation, a set of data. The artist, now effectively handicapped and complacent, content to just show whatever the machine can now make – much easier than he ever could.

In some cases, technology serves only to terribly alienate both producer and audience. This is no better illustrated than by the sad testament of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel films, whose hamfisted and uncomfortable scenes of dialogue make the original films sound like high Shakespeare. It was often not the actors fault, for Lucas, in love with new technology, forced the hapless all-star cast to stare into empty green screens all day,  “imagining” a dialogue with a to-be-later-added CGI character. Perhaps this is an apt metaphor too, this imagining a non-existent dialogue with technology.

However, the key, I believe, particularly for Ruff, is in his role as mediator of the machine. The real art in his work, if you will, is in the mediation. In the quality, in the degree to which (or not) he can effectively and subtly manipulate the computer generated effects to his own personal ends. At times, his work does indeed feel revolutionary and daring, his commitment to a new visionary kind of take on photography assured.

The HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And yet, at other times, some works come across as a little too cold and impersonal, a little too scientific? A little too artificial. One is reminded of the critique of another great science fiction auteur, director Stanley Kubrick, whose  gloomy genius some critics felt lacked an emotional richness, and eventually sympathized a bit too much with the inhuman over the human: all those automated dolly shots into the distance, the sinister HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the sadistic drill sergeants screaming at Marine drones in Full Metal Jacket, sexual fantasy and love reduced to shattered myths in the widely misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut. In Kubrick’s seminal Paths of Glory, years earlier, it was all too clear that Kirk Douglas  was  fighting against the automated systems of bureaucracy and control, even if the war could not be won, it was something to at least be resisted. But in later films, it is not so clear at all. The machine, it would seem, finally won.

Actress Sean Young as Rachel, the haunting Replicant, in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, 1982.

And yet, the artificial does not always have to be inhuman, as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner reminds us. Ironically, the most “human” and rich and emotionally complex characters in this dystopian future are arguably the Replicants, the artificially created ‘simulation’ human beings. Harrison Ford’s Deckard realizes that his role as bounty hunter / pseudo slave-catcher is the actual act of dehumanization, made even more poignant by the final possibility that he is a Replicant himself, tricked into hunting down his own kind because he is told they are inferior beings. Interestingly, Blade Runner’s Replicants have a passion for photographs – they need them! even if they are based on untrue memories.

As Alan Turing famously hypothesized in his Turing test, the day we are convinced we are conversing with a human being, but rather are in fact really communicating with just a computer or artificial intelligence program, is the day we must treat and “think” of the artificial as the human -even if it isn’t. 

So too, would I then prophesize a ‘Turing Test’ of sorts for the likes of computer generated artwork from artists the like of Thomas Ruff. The times we are fooled into thinking we may be looking at the hand of a human being, and not just some satellite or computer algorithm, is perhaps when this mechanized imagery is at its most brilliantly treacherous, when it is its most compelling.

For while Ruff’s endless experimentations and machinations are inherently fascinating to document and discuss, in the end, the degree to which they can somehow convey the human? is their real test, in my eyes.

In their eerie starkness, their ghostly afterimage, made entirely in the machine, some new kind of humanity – may just emerge.

Thomas Ruff’s photograms at Zwirner gallery, Spring 2013.

Thomas Ruff’s Photograms and MA.R.S exhibited at David Zwirner in New York, Spring of 2013.

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Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen’s Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value, 2013.

Jay DeFeo, The Rose, 1958-66. The Whitney Museum of American Art.

 


Prestige is a dirty word.

The almost total failure of contemporary art criticism to talk about prestige, or even admit it exists, is an oversight with profound implications. Art history simply cannot be understood without knowing how prestige actually works, and Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen’s latest book Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value brings some of these particularly important ideas to the fore, many of them admittedly a little too honest, even.

Prestige is a dirty word because every first year curator, MFA student, or gallerist learns to use other ‘terms of art’ to privilege certain works. Far better for an artist or work to be considered “serious” or “important” or historically “significant” than merely just prestigious.

For in the artworld, the mention of prestige’s mere existence is a danger and a threat to power. This is precisely because prestige is a term of nuance. It is perhaps just a bit too honest, because it teases out the subtle distinctions between something meaningful? and perhaps something just successful, a distinction many self-interested parties may just like to avoid.

Prestige allows for the dark possibility that success might not necessarily rely on benevolent cultural barometers like historical significance, but rather, on more shallow principles, like perhaps market success, or just powerful connections. Could an Andy Warhol or a Jeff Koons, or a Damian Hirst be somehow prestigious, but meaningless? Prestigious, but culturally insignificant? Absolute heresy.

Damian Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007. Human skull with 8,601 diamonds.

No artist wants to be considered “prestigious.” For it allows for two dangerous possibilities:  1) that important artists might somehow get ignored by the market, or 2) that the prestigious artist of today may not be considered so years later (heaven forbid). Consider for example the frequent unfashionability of some of history’s greatest artists, from Louis Comfort Tiffany, to Vincent Van Gogh, to William Blake, even to Turner or Rembrandt, all whose work at different times was ignored, misunderstood or even discarded. For a more recent example, go look at Jay DeFeo’s masterpiece The Rose, now properly installed at The Whitney, and reflect on how it had been hidden behind a false wall to rot away at the S.F. Art Institute for 20 years, finally restored only some 50 years later. Consider also how it was The Whitney in New York that finally purchased it, not the much closer SFMoMA.

What makes a work of art prestigious?

Frank Gallo’s Raquel Welch, Time Magazine, 1969.

Exhibit A:

Examine the case of artist Frank Gallo, considered in the 60′s to be the future of American art. He wins a Guggenheim. He is collected by all the important institutions: MoMA, The Met, LACMA, Hirschorn. He is in the Smithsonian’s worldwide exhibition “Alliance on Art,” he is in the Venice Biennale. In 1969, his Raquel Welch figure is on the cover of Time Magazine.

Does anyone remember him? Today, he seems lost to history. Gallo’s art didn’t change, but something else did. He lost prestige. The last major review of his work is in The New York Times from 1972, where already the postmodern critiques of his work are bubbling to the surface. Figuration is out. Minimalism eclipses Pop Art. Formalism is now inadequate. Feminist critique soon abounds, and Gallo’s “girls” seem hopelessly sexist, offensive, juvenile. The artworld no longer confers value on him. Gallo and his work has lost all prestige. It no longer matters that Hugh Hefner collected him. His work no longer “fits” the trajectory of what contemporary art is about. Fifty years later, the authors go looking for his “The Swimmer” in the cavernous storage rooms of the Whitney Museum, purchased back in 1965. It hasn’t been moved or seen since 1984, the last time it went into storage. Gallo is no longer a “serious” artist.

Is this what contemporary art is ‘supposed’ to look like? Zina Saro-Wiwa. Mourning Class: Nollywood, 2010. Video installation on monitors at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Dan Peterman, Accessories to an Event, 1998. Reprocessed plastic. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Rule & Levine’s brilliant takedown of artspeak gobbledygook: International Art English

Dialogue, Dialogue, More Dialogue: Sophia Wallace’s CLITERACY: 100 Natural Laws at Baang + Burne’s booth at Scope Art Fair, 2013.

Answer: the arguments around them. The discourse itself is now rarefied. People have to do or know certain things to understand the discourse, to “get” the discourse. They need degrees. They need to do homework. Often the art viewer must have the work explained to them. And thus we need these professionals – behind the work – more now than ever before.

Today, the professional narrative defines the work of art. Art has become not about new objects, but new narratives – that must be theorized, professionalized, systematized. Participating in a rarefied professional discourse is what defines the work of art, whether it is made up of Brillo boxes or refuse. A painting can still be serious, yes, but it must do a little more heavy lifting now to explain itself, to justify why it was made. Better to be “about” painting than just “be” a painting. In this example, Wade Guyton’s work succeeds brilliantly.

The more “difficult” the professional discourse? the better. (See the wonderful text on International Art English for the ultimate description). As Van Laar’s book argues, Dan Peterman’s objects of recycled plastics are not made of rare materials, nor are they made with rare skill, but rather, the rarity and prestige of his work is in the discourse that accompanies it and deems it ‘important’ art. A Murakami in a Walmart is nothing but a commodity, but a Murakami with an institutional critique? is something else. Personally, I find these frank examples from the book troubling, for they seem to suggest that these kinds of works are not ‘works’ – without their discourse. They seem to ‘need’ this discourse like an astronaut needs his oxygen.

However, for me, the real white elephant in the room that comes to mind is corruption. For the reality of prestige must in the final analysis account for at least some level of corruption in the artworld, because it teases out the differences between worth and value, merit and success, meaning and fame. Granted, maybe Mr. Gallo was a bit overrated in the 1960′s, but what does that portend for today’s superstar artists in 50 years time?

Has dialogue become the new Kingmaker? The ‘knighting’ device that marks some refuse as ‘art’ and other refuse just refuse? Today’s Readymades and High Kitsch, indistinguishable from their more common counterparts, seem so omnipresent now it would seem that dialogue is their prerequisite.

And dialogue is very corruptible in my book. And especially more so when a privileged art-industrial complex sits above the fray with a clear conflict of interest, ready to stand behind works that need their dialogue.

Today’s contemporary art resonates with ideas. And all the more better for it, I say. The public now has the ability to expose itself to a whole host of fascinating theoretical discussions on the nature of art, and its effect on our world.

But if Van Laar and Diepeveen are right, and prestige now lies no longer in the work itself, but only in its professional discourse, we must re-learn how to be skeptical and vigilant in today’s boilerplate marketplace. Especially when in front of institutionally powerful work, backed up by all that impressive, serious discourse. All being made by savvy professionals who know that their existence is only as necessary as the mediation they provide to “translate” that obscure discourse for the ordinary masses. Is discourse the new path of salvation?

Eric Halfvarson as the Grand Inquisitor in Verdi’s Don Carlo, the original inspiration for Dostoyevsky.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor is the high priest who “protects” humanity in blissful ignorance from the awful truths of the Church. But in today’s world, perhaps the real Grand Inquisitors who protect that secret knowledge from the masses are the curators, or the gallerists, or the public art installators.

For discourse, by its nature, is mutable. Inherently contentious, transient, amorphous. It has little substance: it can change literally at the drop of a time. It is as vulnerable to manipulation, deception and illusion as any political dialogue is. When it is used to solely serve power, as in the case of propaganda, it can be insidious and dangerous.

And it is perhaps even more insidious when it is has its cake and eats it too: when an institution can claim to be championing “institutional critique” from below, by cloaking money, power and real estate from above in supposed left-wing or “critical” dialogue. I am reminded here of a particularly fascinating critique of American conservative thought, who some theorists have argued is in fact a Rightwing idea wrapped in an ingenious Leftwing narrative, that an essentially Aristocratic agenda can never be openly so, that it must necessarily pretend to be one of the common man. That is how you get grass roots organizers fighting for corporate tax breaks. Or consider some of the followers of Leo Strauss’s political philosophy, which could be argued is literally a philosophy of deception. The Iraq War proves this notion beautifully, as the justification for the war over the years seamlessly morphs from one reason to another, to another, to another . . .  Any will really do, as long as folks buy it.

For, as much as I enjoy the discourse, and as much as I myself participate in this discourse, I still find it somewhat troubling. The notion that a work of art could sort of be “substance-free” – and defined solely by the quality of the professional commentariat behind it or not – is incredibly cynical to me. Some part of me I guess still wants to believe, perhaps naively, that there is some intrinsic quality to the work itself, one that needs no discourse, needs no explanation, needs no PhD. Can the work ever transcend the discourse?

Seward Johnson’s Forever Marilyn statue, Chicago. What is its discourse? High Kitsch would seem to have it mastered its own art of self-defense.

Too-Big-To-Fail-Artwork, Fifty feet high, costing 1 million dollars, installed in an institutional setting, with the proper professional narrative behind it, seems unquestionable today. They are the derivatives of our artworld, and much like Wall Street’s version, as long as we don’t look too carefully inside, they may make us Insiders all a lot of money. As the classic Wall Street trader joke goes, keep trading those tins of sardines, over and over, just whatever you do! Don’t ever actually open them. Whatever you do, don’t eat the contents, because everyone knows the fish rotted out long ago. The sardines are for trading, not for eating.

I think we must start to ask some dirty questions, and to start using some dirty words. For starters: Is the prestige deserved? And second, why do we assume so? Who wants us to assume so?

If we want artwork in the future to be something more than just a tradeable commodity, we may just have to start opening some of those cans of worms.   •

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Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 69, 2008, Archival pigment print.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Barbara Kasten, Construct LB/5, 1982. Polaroid.

Of course, eventually the great Modernists did succeed in raising Photography’s status to that of the highest of high art, where it is, today, with its own little gallery down the museum halls, just like they always wanted.

But today, many people are still unaware of some of the costs that came with this great success, this so called “separate department” of Art. For, possibly unlike any other medium, to achieve this unique status, Photography had to be conventionalized. It had to be institutionalized – to perhaps to a greater degree than any other medium. Certain things had to be in, others, out. The medium had to have some particular rules, some conventions, some cliches that necessitated and always somehow justified that separate gallery. And so of course there was always that inherent danger that if the medium ever starting looking or acting a little bit “too much” like those bigger brothers, that it threatened its own funding and livelihood. An almost willful ignorance happily developed.

And so, fine art Photography, still to this day, relies on this false premise that every medium has its “own” discrete agenda, its “own” personal aesthetics. As a result, a kind of incestuous quality spawned in the medium, wherein it sought to isolate itself from other mediums and influences. Photography increasingly referenced only itself, and only its own history, seemingly oblivious to the wider world out there.

This was very humorously brought home to me at a recent panel discussion for the AIPAD show at Hunter College in New York on the history of Color Photography, where much of the discussion referenced the big “discovery” of color starting out with the seminal color work of photographers like William Eggleston in the 1960′s and 70′s. But Ms. Kasten sort of ruined this happy little narrative, by suggesting that unlike other photographers on the panel, to her, that’s not when she “discovered” color. Color was already “there,” she said, in fact, it was always there. She just wasn’t thinking only like a photographer, assuming black and white was the default, or only, tradition.

Think of someone like director Quentin Tarantino, and all the endless cinephile “movie and TV only” pop culture references in his films, and you will get a vibe for this kind of incestuous overtone I describe, one that lionizes particular influences, but eschews others. Even to this day, 100 years later, Pictorialism and so called ‘painterly’ concerns are still marginalized, all those great Modernist photographers having finally succeeded in championing their more Purist notions of the photographic print and what it should “do” – and not do.

Of course, someday Photography may just have to come to terms with all of this, and much like with the real Brown vs. Board of Education in the civil rights movement, realize what it may have to give up in its precious isolation to gain in a wider and more integrated synthesis with all of the Arts.

Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 125, 2011, Archival pigment print.

Regardless, it is with a unique pleasure we consider the work of Barbara Kasten, who does not seem at all to be constrained by any of these limiting concerns. Quite the contrary, her influences are many and diverse, including Lazló Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Robert Irwin and James Turrell to name just a few. And probably not by accident, unlike many a photography student today, she came to photography indirectly, trained initially as a painter in the late 1950′s, experimenting with sculpture and soft material in the 60′s, eventually turning to the two dimensional photograph only by the 70′s.

And this is where her sophistication is apparent. Balancing menace and elegance, Kasten synthesizes sculpture, painting and architecture to create new forms. Unlike many others, photography is material to her; she uses real space, rather than just, say, moving elements on paper, or working cameraless in the darkroom in the tradition of say the conventional photogram. Rather, she builds what she likes to call “Constructs” in her studio out of a variety of objects – Plexiglas panels, spheres, mirrors, pyramids, columns, paper, and then photographs them in light and shade.

Barbara Kasten, IV-B, 1980. Cibachrome.

Kasten’s images have weight and depth, sharp edges that hover above and hurtle down. Her work has the push and pull of a painting, but along with the complicated environment that only the light and shadow of the photographic can provide. As Estelle Jussim wrote: “They are theatre, sculpture, painting, light play–all masquerading as photographs.”

Her medium is photography, but it is not conventionally conceived.  Often they have a Freudian quality to them. It is hard to ignore all those dangerous, sharp edges, those pointy glass shards, and not imagine some kind of knife, some kind of weapon, penetrations.

Barbara Kasten, Construct III-C, 1980. Polaroid Print.

Barbara Kasten is represented by Bortolami Gallery in New York, Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. Her website is www.barbarakasten.net

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Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1436).

The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography by Lyle Rexer. Cover by Bill Armstrong.

 


“Now I have to learn the craft of a blind man.”                                                                                  – a friend quoting painter Edgar Degas.



When Edgar Degas enlisted in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he had trouble seeing the rifle targets with his right eye. Over the course of the next decades, Degas eye problems would only get worse. Glare and sunlight bothered him terribly. He saw black spots. Eventually he would need a maid to read to him. He took to making wax figures, partly just to have something he could mold and feel, and not just visualize. Degas fought a creeping blindness for the rest of his life, eventually forced sadly to give up painting in 1912.



Could some of Degas’ best work be because of his blurred vision and creeping blindness, and not just in spite of it?


But the resultant effects of this deteriorating vision on his artistic production we know all too well. Both Degas’ later watercolors and sculptures have an incredible vitality to them. In later years, his strokes loosen, widen, and become more free. There is not the same detail as was in his earlier work, certainly, but there is also a curious, new hazy glow to his figures, as they dance and shimmer in pastel.

A computer simulation of Degas’ eyesight by Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at
Stanford.

Dr. Michael F. Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford, uses computer simulations to envision what he thinks might have happened to the vision of some of the Impressionists. Monet’s eye problems are of course well known, and so many have speculated that the Impressionists increasing tendencies towards abstraction may have in part due to such optical concerns. 

Historical speculation has suggested that Degas suffered from some form of retinal disease or macular degeneration. Interestingly, among other effects, patients with macular disease often tend to choose stronger colours because they perceive a colour’s intensity more weakly. The intense colours used by Degas in his later pictures could therefore be explained – at least in part – by his eye problems.

Perhaps the work of contemporary artist Bill Armstrong is a case in point for the strange, suggestive power of the blur, and for photography’s unique ability to mirror the effects of blindness. For Armstrong’s work makes literal use of the blurred vision we think an artist like Degas was forced to suffer from -and in many cases, possibly also benefit from, adapt to, and overcome.

Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1408)

Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1405)

Actor Clarke Peters as Mardi Gras Indian chief Albert Lambreaux in Treme.

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Bill Armstrong, Untitled (Film Noir #1431).

Bill Armstrong is represented by Clampart in New York, Gallery Kayafas in Boston and Hackelbury Fine Art in London, among others. His website is www.billarmstrongphotography.com

Film Noir is at Clampart gallery through April 6th, 2013: 521-531 West 25th Street, New York, NY, between 10th/11th Avenues.

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Detail of Will Gompertz’s Map of Modern Art

Creative Enterprise by Martha Buskirk

What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz

 
What comes after Postmodernism?

Over the past 20 years, there’s been an ongoing pitched battle to coin the latest contemporary art movement, after the ‘end’ of Postmodernism, which, like The V&A or The Tate have told us, is now officially dead and buried.

Most attempts at a new terminology have not fared too well, sounding fairly ridiculous, be they Post Post Modernism, Metamodernism, Altermodernism, Sensationalism, etc etc. Modernism was originally a terrible panic term (modern originally meaning ‘right now’) so lets hope we don’t have to endure another 100 years of bad terminology forced to use, negate or somehow reference what was actually a limited  term for historical purposes to begin with.  

It turns out however we may have arrived at a good compromise. Authors Will Gompertz, a former director at The Tate, & Martha Buskirk have both recently written books discussing the trends of Entrepreneurialism.

Gompertz coins the term in the last chapter of his What Are You Looking At?, an interesting London Underground ride through the past 150 years of Modern Art movements. He even creates a clever Tube map for us showing how movements in his eye merge into the next.

Individual Train Line key to the different movements of Will Gompertz’s London Underground Art Map.

As frame for Entrepreneurialism, Gompertz uses two different Damien Hirst exhibitions: the first in 1988 called Freeze, the second twenty years later, when he went straight to Sotheby’s Auction House, selling in the secondary market (with no primary, ie a gallery). What better example than the most ‘successful’ artist of today? In both cases using exemplary Entrepreneurial spirit, first, in organizing his own exhibition, and second, cutting out the whole gallery system.

Alex Prager, Deborah, C Print.

Tracey Emin, My Bed.

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Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2006. Inkjet on canvas.

An old saying goes:

If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . .  well then . . .  it might just be a DUCK.

Today, we live in a postmedium age. A hybrid age. There are no more easy categories or rote definitions to live up to. Perhaps more than ever before, we are confronted by very strange, hybrid works of art. Works of unidentifiable mediums. And we do not know what to call them.

Many artworks nowadays look, act and feel like paintings, and are  certainly easily mistaken for such, even very close up. But they are technically not paintings at all.

Case in point is the work of artist Wade Guyton. His ‘paintings’ are in fact prints on linen canvas, made with an Epson printer.

The accidents and mishaps that occur in his printer, as he folds, drags, squashes and intentionally jams the canvas through the printer result in a fascinating series of mis-registrations, streaks, and degradations of chance and accident.

It is not Guyton – but rather his machine – that causes these pattern overruns, glitches and aberrations that repeat throughout his canvas. In true Warholian tradition, Guyton claims he is similarly too “lazy” to actually paint, much as Warhol once claimed he too would rather be a machine.

Installation of Wade Guyton’s ‘OS’ at The Whitney Museum of Art, October 2012 – January 2013.

WORDS BY:  John D’Agostino

Wade Guyton, Untitled,
2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen.

It is high time to call for a re-framing of just what painting is in the 21st century, and what is really all about. Painting is not about paint. Let me say that again: painting is not about paint, nor does it have to be made with paint.

Whether or not a painting is actually made with paint is perhaps the least interesting thing about it. And artists have been painting without paint for centuries now, from Francesco di Giorgio’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at The Metropolitan Museum (using shades of wood) to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Favrile glass, which is perhaps the ultimate examplar, because the few sections of his stained glass windows that are actually painted over (such as faces or hands) are much less effective compared to the flowing use of layers of glass to suggest everything else.

I hope we can now move past these exhausted ideologies and old world categories. As professor Lance Winn and others have called for, it is time to discuss what Mr. Guyton’s paintings actually mean, and whether their study and reflection is worthwhile or not. As Marshall McLuhan once likened, as one medium becomes re-mediated and hybridized into the next, sometimes the new medium may actually fulfill the promises of the old.

Wade Guyton is represented by Petzel Gallery in NY and Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Wade Guyton OS exhibited at The Whitney Museum in January 2013.

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Jessica Eaton, cfaal 109, Archival Pigment Print, 2011.

 
An artist friend once told me that when you don’t know what you’ll get back, that’s when you know you’re finally onto something.

Jessica Eaton says she likes to make images that surprise her, and they certainly do to us as well.


Eaton is part of a cadre of young photographers who experiment with and exploit the technical effects of the photographic medium with ingenuity, daring, and delight. (For more, see The Contemporaries, including Matthew Brandt, Christopher Colville or Bryan Graf). Her images are not visible to the naked eye, but rather exist in the realm of the photographic, often created in camera with large format film. In her “Interpolation Dramatizations” and “RGB Weaves” works, she is similarly using analogue process to symbolize digital algorithms.

Eaton often takes several exposures at a time, rendering up colours, forms and effects unconnected to any solid object. She may not know exactly what she will get back till the photographs are actually developed. Perhaps her most-recognized series is “Cubes for Albers and LeWitt,” for which she utilizes multiple exposures of cubes to explore the layering and blending of primary colors.

Jessica Eaton, cfaal 260, Archival Pigment Print, 2012

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino

Jessica Eaton, cfaal 254, Archival Pigment Print, 2012.

Jessica Eaton is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Higher Pictures in New York. Her website is:  www.jessicaeaton.com

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Poet, painter, engraver and prophet, William Blake (1727-1857) is arguably the greatest artist Britain ever produced, whose singular talents in both words and pictures were neglected for almost a century after his death. For Blake, a man’s vision was the one and only great fact about him. Poetry, art and religion were not separate activities, but all extensions of man’s greatest quality: his imagination. For an artist, the only question that interested Blake was: Do you see?

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

The task Blake set out for himself was not to just depict a scene, but the representation of vision. For Blake, man’s ‘Original Sin’ was the losing of his visionary faculty to focus instead on more practical matters. The word mysticism originates from the ancient Greek, literally – to shut the eyes. In Blake, here is the artist-mystic, someone who claimed to have visions his whole life. ‘Seeing’ for Blake was not simply using the eyes, but the brain as well. Blake set out to use discipline and will-power on his senses to attempt to see further and deeper than any artist before him.

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794.

In his prophetic books, Blake juxtaposed images and text in a way not done since the Middle Ages. His imagery is populated with great winged beasts, angels, demons, ethereal women, children at play, and imposing Yahwehs with long white beards. Blake synthesized many different myths and religious histories, both Christian and pagan, into psychodramas where the main action often would take place within the mind of a single individual. His creatures glow with a spectral, inner phosphorus, summoned up it would seem, directly from heaven or hell itself.

Rimbaud said: “The poet should be a visionary; one should make oneself a visionary . . .” This was Blake’s credo. Despite Blake’s unique gifts, he felt that the visionary faculty was something naturally occurring in all men. ‘The Man of Genius’ or those he called ‘The Men of Imagination’ were only individuals who had spent time and effort disciplining the visionary faculty.

Vision was not something you were born with, or somehow ‘caught’ by accident like the measles, but rather the result of a long, hard discipline of the senses, the forcing of the imagination in new directions. For Blake, everyone could see a world in a grain of sand – but only if they chose to see it. British author Colin Wilson deemed this essentially two different ways of seeing the world, that, can simply be called ‘The Inspired’ and ‘The Uninspired.’ The artist’s task is to connect the two. In Blake, imagination was “the real and eternal world”- of which the everyday “vegetable universe” was but just a faint shadow. Blake’s was not the reality of the retina. His pictures were a superior reality. Blake conceptualized the imagination – both in verse and image – as active, dynamic and most importantly, volitional. He makes almost all other artists seem like victims of impotent aspirations in comparison.

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

As Blake puts it: ‘And I know that This World is a World of Imagination & Vision… to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter series of novels such as Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs often make use of Blakean imagery. In Michael Mann’s underrated thriller Manhunter (1986), William Peterson’s knack for seeing as killers do leads him to Francis Dollarhyde, the ‘Tooth Fairy’ killer. Kidnapping an unscrupulous tabloid reporter, Dollarhyde shows his bound victim slides of William Blake to terrify him. On the screen he shows him Blake’s The Great Red Dragon – the combined fears of all of mankind: the Prince of Darkness himself, from The Book of Revelations.

Do you see? Do you see? Dollarhyde asks. For Blake, the answer was definitely a yes.   •

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“Color: humiliated, defeated, prepares its revenge over the long years.”

Yves Klein

WORDS BY: John D’Agostino
WORKS: www.EmpireofGlass.com

Devil’s Dyes

Since 1903, the Crayola crayon company has had an evolving array of nomenclatures, from Granny Smith Apple, Asparagus and Cerulean, to Apricot, Pink Sherbert and Canary. In 1962, Crayola’s apt but disturbing color ‘Flesh’ was renamed into ‘Peach’ – in response to horrified complaints.

Today, in a world full of plentiful artificial dyes, it is harder to truly appreciate the mysterious business that once was the world of color. But, back in the day, color was full of great secrets, prohibitions and tragic histories. The ghosts of pigments past are a lurid expose of suffering, murder and tragedy. A few examples for each hue will suffice.

John D’Agostino, Euclydian Abyss, 2010.

In 1609, Henry IV of France imposed the death penalty on the use of Indigo, the “deceitful and injurious dye.” Of course, many colors were originally made from crops in the colonies that relied on forced human labor and slavery. Protestant Black, the well known color of the Puritans, was banned when the British did not have access to the Spanish’s colonies of logwood dyeing plantations. Perhaps the cruelest of the colors was the incredibly poisonous Lead White, whose notorious toxicity did not sway artists from use. Carmine Red, used for cardinal’s frocks and young ladies’ lips, was literally made of blood – from the crushing of the white insect the Cochineal beetle, a secret which the Spanish jealously guarded for years. Stradivari, the master violin maker – made a special orange varnish – Tiger Varnish – that to this day is still unknown, perhaps the reason why his instruments play so beautifully.

Scheele’s Green, invented in the late 18th century, replaced all older green pigments. It became popular for use with wallpaper, brightening the rooms of many schoolchildren. Unfortunately, it was made from arsenic. In the 19th century it was used as a food dye for sweets, by the 1930′s, it was recognized as a poison and insecticide. Many speculate that Napolean himself may have been sickened by it when in exile in the luxurious green rooms of St. Helena.

Tyrian (Royal) Purple suggested the height of luxury, wealth and prestige. To extract this color, every toga required the deaths of thousands of shellfish, leading to the extinction of certain species of the murex. Eventually the Byzantine emperors banned the common people from wearing purple, and so the saying goes, “born in purple.” Bone Black was made from the scraps of the slaughterhouse – cattle or lamb thighs mostly. And what was really in Egyptian Brown or ‘Mummy Brown’ one must wonder, although we do know the Egyptians wrapped their mummies in canvas. It’s not a terrible leap to imagine that at some time in human history remains may have provided for an excellent hue. And so perhaps we should all be giving our pigments a proper burial, just in case.

“Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things.”

– Rilke

John D’Agostino, Lunar Synthesis, 2010.

 

When the straight line tells the truth, color tells beautiful lies. So thought Yves Klein: dreamer, alchemist, performance artist and painter. A self-described proprietor of color, Klein claimed that his first work of art was made when he ‘appropriated’ blue straight out of the sky. As an artist who worked in intense color fields for years, Yves felt that color was unappreciated – forgotten, ignored, and rarely used to its fullest powers. Whereas the line, on the other hand, got too much credit. The line, he said, cuts through space as a ‘tourist’ – it is always in transit. The line ‘expresses’ itself by dividing and separating, making limits. But color, Klein thought, is open, a true inhabitant of space. If the line cuts space, then color impregnates space. It is space. And so this was Yves’ revenge, the domain of color. To make works where color predominated, and reigned supreme. As he said:

“Through color, I experience a feeling of complete identification with space, I am truly free…”

Jean Luc Marion described this kind of experience, this “rising of invus,” as a saturated phenomenon: an extra-dimensional kind of space. By overwhelming our ability to represent or categorize what we are seeing, a saturated phenomena has the ability to create atmosphere and presence. As he describes, “the artwork becomes a unique locus in which time, space, and the horizontal field of vision are compressed into a confined arena.” Scientifically speaking, the eye can only distinguish the wavelengths between 0.00038 and 0.00075 millimeters, barely scratching the surface. And yet, these little differences are everything. With a myriad of nuances, color calls attention to surface while also colliding with deep space. Its being is in infinity. Colors overwhelm us, envelop us, invade us.

In the dark – when it is even more strange – is when color really gets interesting. Many a color is re-discovered in the dark. Colors on the verge are particularly dangerous, for they are not quite the same. Never one color, but many. Colors at the ends of the spectrum move and shift. They are on the threshold of existence. Perhaps this is why many of Yves Klein’s colors, including the one he named for himself – International Klein Blue, verge occasionally just towards the dark of the spectrum. They confound, confuse – and delight. The mystery and power of color – as he reminds us – is to be marginalized, ignored, and forgotten at our own peril.

Close your eyes. Now rub them. Even with no light whatsoever – strange colors appear out of the darkness. No wonder then a child might ask his mother: “What is it that I see when my eyes are closed?” In the dark lies the forgotten colors of the crayola box. What names we must invent for the impossible colors to come, still remains to be discovered.   • This text first appeared as part of the paper The Abyss Gazes Also: The Pains and Pleasures of Seeing in the Dark by John D’Agostino, 2012.
View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

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