Such A Dirty Mind

On Friday, Nitasha and I ventured out to Chelsea to see if there was anything worthwhile. I always find it's pretty hit-and-miss in the Chelsea galleries, and I wasn't optimistic for the August shows (New York is deserted in August). Generally, I would say there were mostly misses this time, but there were a few great things.

One of the highlights was a Cecily Brown painting from 1999 ("Boy Trouble" - left image) that was hung in a group show called "Naked" - a collection of almost 50 figurative paintings from as early as the 1800's to today. The Cecily Brown painting was one of the best I've seen of her work (I saw the Oct 2008 show at Gagosian and had mixed feelings about it) and it was definitely the best piece in the show. The paint handling was a tour de force - varied and exciting. While the style was loose and gestural, there was a great sense of editing, just enough control that every smear and mark oozed with intention. I thought it was a much more powerful piece than those from 2008. The newer work is much more chaotic, full of anxiety and a hyper-kinetic energy - the initial confrontation with it is impressive, but with a longer look, the paint overwhelms every representational reference, making the experience more of an adventure in painterly abstraction than anything else. But in this 1999 painting, the energy seemed to emanate from within the figure itself - a man with a huge erection dominating the canvas.

But since I've always considered myself an abstract painter, it makes me wonder why I wouldn't prefer Brown's 2008 paintings that have been obliterated into abstraction? When did I cross the line from abstract painter to conceptual painter to (gasp!) FIGURE PAINTER?? While I have been using the figure in my work, I wouldn't say my work has been ABOUT the figure. But maybe it should be. Maybe I want it to be. Maybe it already is. Dear God.

And then there's that huge erection. Really? I'm certainly no prude (and I love this particular painting), but I don't understand why so much of the figure painting in contemporary art (that gets any international attention) seems to be either graphically violent or pornographic. It's just so OBVIOUS. Are there not more subtleties to be explored in the human condition? And even if sex and violence are so fundamental to human nature that any image of the figure cannot avoid them, are there not more interesting and complex ways to address them? In Camera Lucida, Barthes talks about how some photographs are endowed with a "blind field" - that the punctum of the photograph (discussed in my posting yesterday) implies a broader image/context than the photograph explicitly shows, which the viewer makes seen through his own assumptions/imagination/input. That seems much more interesting to me. Why do these artists feel compelled to display the contents of their own dirty mind, when it seems much more confrontational and provocative (and ultimately more effecting) to create an image that forces the viewer to delve into the contents of their own dirty mind. I think Kara Walker is one artist who does this particularly well - the disturbing implications of her work come from the viewer making the final connections in the images she creates, a much more potent and shocking experience for the viewer - although a lot of Walker's work is still pretty graphic, I think her more ambiguous images are much intriguing and arresting.

Speaking of the erotic image, Barthes writes:

"it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate the photograph and that it animates me. The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together." (p.59)

Admittedly, it's much harder for the artist to involve the viewer in the completion of an image, but as Barthes argues, those are the images that the viewer retains in his/her memory - when the image is completed by SHUTTING the eyes.

My fascination with these issues may mean my work is heading somewhere new - sensuality, eroticism, seduction...more subtlety and suggestion...it may be a whole new world.

At the Airport with Roland Barthes

There is much to discuss. I have been in New York since my last posting, and the ideas and inspiration from my trip are overwhelming. But I will start where my trip began - at the airport, stuck in endless delays, but where luckily I was kept in good company by Roland Barthes - through his short but classic text "Camera Lucida", in which he attempts to identify and define the essence of photography. (I know - it's a little weird that this is my holiday reading, but alas....)

He begins by explaining that his relationship to photography is not as a photographer, but only as part of the "spectrum" of a photograph (being the target of the photographer's shot) or as a spectator (looking at a photograph). His inquiries begin with his subjective responses to these experiences.

As the subject of a photographed portrait, he laments the "sensation of inauthenticity" he inevitably experiences as he is caught by the photographer's searching gaze, conscious of the conflict of four separate selves: "the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art." (p.13) In this transformation from subject to object, he finds the specter of Death - "I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person" (p.14). He returns to this idea throughout the book, and it reminds me of Andy Warhol's interest in the connection between the photograph, the image and death. But more interesting to me is viewing photography as a way to resist death, as a means of creating immortality (or at least the promise of such). That aspect of the real that is captured in the photograph may "die" upon the camera shutter's release, but it is instantly reincarnated into a new aspect of the real through the life of its photographed image. Indeed, Barthes later writes, "Photography has something to do with resurrection." It is "at once the past and the real." (p.82) I currently explore this notion in my work by choosing images that play with the idea of the past and present, and that raise questions about how images of/about/from the past persist in our contemporary visual culture. In many ways, my recent paintings may be seen as reincarnations of images that are themselves reincarnations. I have been conceiving of my work as a series of translations, but the notion of reincarnation may be a more accurate and more interesting formulation to consider.

Barthes then goes on to analyze those photographs to which he is attracted. I love his introduction to this section: "I see photographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking; they are only "images", their mode of appearance is heterogeneous. Yet, among those which had been selected, evaluated, approved, collected in albums or magazines and which had thereby passed through the filter of culture, I realized that some provoked tiny jubilations, as if they referred to a stilled center, an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself..." (p 16). I feel like I could have written this myself about my reason for having images as my subject matter and my reasons for choosing specific images that I want to "reincarnate" in paint - ("they refer...to an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself"...I love that.)

Later, he writes that a photograph he loves produces in him "an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken." (p.19) This quote reminded me of something the (amazing) artist Ann Hamilton once said (and I paraphrase) - that the artist's job is to make visible what cannot be spoken. I know in the art that I love, there is often that heartbreaking recognition of a kind of unspoken - perhaps even unspeakable - truth. Barthes even compares the impact of a photograph as a "wound". I worry about my own work veering too far into the cerebral and moving further and further away from the emotional, the sensual, the soulful. For I agree with Barthes: "I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."

One thing I did not expect in this text was how Barthes relates photography to elements of performance. In one passage he refers to the photograph as evidence of a photographer's "performance", and later declares that the best word to describe his experience with photographs that he likes is as an "adventure". ("In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. [...] this is what creates every adventure." (p.20) This directly relates to the idea I explored in my August 4, 2009 blog regarding conceptualizing painting as performance. Nothing like getting a little encouragement from one of the heavyweights.

And then came the idea of the punctum. Before reading Camera Lucida, I was somewhat familiar with Barthes' use of this term, but in this text, he describes it as "that accident [caught in the photographed image] which pricks me". That emphasis on the punctum as an accidental aspect to the picture recalled discussions I had had in my Visual Arts & Music class last year regarding the difference between the iterative vs. improvisational aspects of performance. Through these discussions and in analyzing my own work, I began to think of improvisation as the key to the life of a painting (or more broadly speaking, a performance). Barthes' punctum concept seems to capture a similar sentiment with respect to a photograph. It is the uncontrolled/accidental/improvisational aspects of art that keep each performance for the viewer alive. Of course the punctum may be different for each viewer, but with respect to painting, I believe the punctum must be found at least in part in the artist's handling of the paint. It's why the PAINT matters. And I know this is an aspect I need to push further in my own work.

I must have gotten on the plane around this point and finally headed off toward Manhattan. Ideas were swimming in my head, and I hadn't even landed yet. It was only the beginning.