… just sayin
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Theory and Process in Contemporary Painting
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don’t be anachronistic
Thanks to the constant onslaught of mass media, we are forced to look at so much ordinary visual information that no matter how many symbols, back stories, analogies or clever references one builds into a painting, it is impossible to see that sort of work as an object of higher function. Paintings need exceptional formal invention (as well as subjective relevance) to be received by the sophisticated viewer as anything above a car commercial or highway billboard. This has always been the case, and it is only when we get nostalgic that we forget that it takes tremendous effort to to position ourselves in the actual contemporary state of painting.
the disposable plane
The suburbs and exurbs are permanent destruction of both land and culture. There will be no re-building of the old landscapes, the ranches, farms, groves, swamps, and forests which were replaced by the rotting, cheaply-built stucco-boxes. They will become ghettos and dangerous wastelands and kudzu-covered shells. No land is disposable.
Unlike some other products, the collapse of the market for these overpriced houses will not be followed by a quick “correction” which will make everything right again. The investors who currently own the loans will not be willing to loose half or two-thirds of the value of mortgages which they were not responsible for selling to the homeowners in the first place. Home prices will rise so gradually, that the owners will not live to see the day that the purchase price is recovered. The contractors and real estate agents who built and sold these pieces of garbage were the only winners in this scam.
Now this is the modern and future landscape, geographically, economically and politically; not some ultra-urban, high-density abstraction of New York, Chicago, Berlin or Tokyo. The mega-city is the truth for some people, but certainly not most. The future for most Americans will be the unending expanse of polluted, low-density ghetto.
The problem in the United States has been that we treat land like a concept, an imaginary disposable plane, an infinite supply of ideas, a painting, or rather a collection of paintings that can always be expanded; there are always more canvases and sheets of paper to buy at the store on which we can just keep ruling and scribbling. In places like Europe people know their land is limited; they just have the one canvas to play with, so they don’t go wrecking large portions of it quite as often. One day we will see our land in this way, maybe not, either way we don’t currently treat it that way, only as zones of more or less monetary value. We have not yet completed our manifest destiny of paving over the continent.
Land is our one truly limited and irreplaceable resource. When we run out of oil and coal we may have alternative energy plans. There are no alternative land plans and no renewable land resources.
ontology and Robert Ryman
This past July my girlfriend and I took a trip to New York and New Jersey, mostly to see art (she has an art history degree) and of course to do some touristy stuff like see a Broadway show, Ground Zero, the High Line, Chinatown and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, among other things. After four intense days of New York City we had plans to drive an hour upstate to Beacon, NY to see Dia: Beacon, a huge museum dedicated mostly to large-scale artworks such as those of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra and others.
Dia: Beacon also has a significant amount of work by Robert Ryman, a painter whom I had underappreciated as a sort of academic, theoretical painter; no one with much relevance to my own ideas on painting. Having been there to see several of his pieces in real life and really think about them I have changed my tune completely. He is one of the most important painters alive and it’s unfortunate that more students, artists and “civilians” are not enlightened to his work. I don’t know what’s going on in art schools today but he was never mentioned in the entirety of my undergraduate education, save for a small piece of his being included in a university museum show of contemporary abstract painting.
The initial reaction by most people to his work is, naturally, “It’s all just white!” and that’s mostly true, except for his very early work, but what I say to people to get them to re-focus their attention on what his work is really about is to compare it to how a blind or a deaf person experiences the world. When you remove one sensory experience, the others become heightened, more attuned to the ontological (the philosophy of reality itself as opposed to how it is mediated by our senses) reality around them. Ryman’s paintings use only white paint because he is essentially painting everything except color (although technically white is a color). We are force to look at what paint really is: surface, volume, molecules, to imagine what it would be like to touch it, how light reflects off of it, how it was applied, how it interact is various ways with its support surface and apparatus. Ryman has painted in innumerable different ways in order to fully enlighten us on all these factors and perhaps to make us realize just how arbitrary our typical methods of painting really are, such as “acrylic on stretched canvas” or “oil on panel.”
Why white? It’s not only the most neutral or “absent” color, Ryman makes it beautiful in a way no one else has. In art school I make a giant spaceship-like structure using only cardboard and kraft tape, and one of the revelations of the project was to really see the color of cardboard. It’s orange! I had never thought of that before. Similarly, Ryman makes us see color in a whole new way when he removes it, and only it, from our experience of painting. It’s a simulation of an ontologically pure object, as close as we can get to “seeing” without looking.
That epiphany this summer yielded many others on the seemingly arbitrary components of painting: Why is it viscous? Why is it on a flat surface? Why does it dry faster or slower? Why do we apply it with brushed or rollers, or other tools? Why oil or acrylic or gouache? It is much easier to contemplate all the dimensions of painting: hue, value, viscosity, texture, opacity uniformity, surface (both optic and haptic) and therefore make better, more informed decisions about how to paint, when you remove a dimension you are used to having around all the time.
aesthetics and value part i
There is plenty written about aesthetics in art, more so than any other aspect of art, but that’s probably because any formula for explaining why we feel the way we do about aesthetic experiences is so elusive. We generally don’t like to think of things as completely subjective; we want to qualify and quantify experiences to the nth degree, mostly so that we can re-create them, improve them, explain ourselves and the universe and share ideas with and relate to other people. Despite our best efforts to explain aesthetics (the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty and value) we have not satisfactorily described exactly what is beautiful and positive and what is ugly and negative, or even if that dichotomy really exists. It is purely a psychological question about which the outside universe does not care.
I run into this question because I catch myself denying that I care about aesthetics at all, thanks to my overblown worship of the Abstract Expressionist philosophy that seems to deny formalism and aesthetics completely. Barnett Newman famously said, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” and I believed that he meant it, until recently. He and others in the movement, Rothko, Motherwell, Pollock, were, for a time, struggling to break away from a school of art which was pure formalism and aesthetics, pretty pictures, which was especially difficult when faced with formalist geometric abstraction (Mondrian, Malevich, etc.). Now I realize that Newman’s was a statement of rhetoric, of hyperbole. Of course his paintings are gorgeous, and he knew it at the time, but to acknowledge it at the time would have been to confuse his argument that his paintings were (seemingly) pure psychological experience, pure spiritualism, “sublime” as he called it.
Now when I make something which just happens to be aesthetically pleasing, I can’t help second-guessing myself. I ask “is this okay?” and “what was my real intention in making it this way?” and I have trouble with the answer because I try to paint very intuitively. Who knows what in the subconscious decides to make something “pretty” or not? The composer Aaron Copland said that, even when you are not aware of it, when you are creating something you are making decisions. As mysterious as the creative germ may be, you still have the power to decide to write (or paint) x instead of y or z, and you will do yourself a great deal of service to be aware of when you are making these decisions, to be “aware of your awareness.” I first read that phrase in high school, when I still planned to study music composition, and only after finishing art school did I understand it.
One way to look at the question of aesthetics is comparatively. For example, I have a clear, reliable aesthetic opinion of certain types of people, particularly women. Stay with me. I know it’s a little juvenile to say so, but it honestly is the most reliable case study I can give myself in aesthetics because I have never once changed my mind about it. Why am I attracted to women? This takes me on a course into biology with which I am not totally familiar. My only assumption is that an evolutionary biologist could surmise that some part of my brain evolved to react this way to ensure the continuation of the species, a leftover from a time when procreation was a lot dicier.
Is this how all of aesthetics works? We’re just wired for it? There is just generally a hard-wired sense of “pretty” and “ugly”?
My real problem is how I feel about making something aesthetically pleasing. What is the value of that? Why bother making something (intentionally) beautiful? Or why bother making something ugly for that matter? It seems pointless to simply exercise ones ability to paint something to which others will predictably react on that level. I guess I don’t really know what other people think of my paintings (or those of anyone else’s) and I never will; I’m not in their heads. The leap of faith required to share psychological experiences with another person with whom we only share phenomenology only takes us so far.
(More to come later in Part II)
writing an artist statement
Writing a proper artist statement for an academic program is proving to be even more difficult than making the art itself. Generally speaking, too many artists rarely think it’s their responsibility to learn how to express their ideas in writing, and rarer still to carefully consider their audience, intentions, all the sources of their ideas and methods, etc. To pack all of this into a one-page statement, make it sound intelligent but not pretentious, has become a massive undertaking in research and practice. I have dozens of handwritten and typed notes and sound bites lying around, but I still don’t have them organized, not that I’m even through making the raw material yet.
I made myself a short (unfinished) list of rules for the statement:
- describe intentions
- explain motivation(s)
- demonstrate awareness of precedent
- articulate a position in theory/philosophy
- articulate a political position
- try to NOT list influences by name, especially other artists
- do NOT treat as pedagogy
This list has been growing gradually and I expect it might continue
Rachel Wronowski’s art show
My friend Rachel has an art opening Saturday night at the Uptown Wine Bar in Baldwin Park in Orlando, FL this Saturday night at 8pm:
See you there!
types of agnosia (chart)
source: Wikipedia
| Name | Description |
| Alexia | Inability to recognize text.[3] |
| Akinetopsia | The loss of motion perception.[4] |
| Alexithymia | While not strictly a form of agnosia, Alexithymia may be difficult to distinguish from or co-occur with social-emotional agnosia. Alexithymia is deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing emotions common to around 85% of people on the autism spectrum. Alexithymia is believed to be due to an information processing delay in the combined processing of information in the left and right hemispheres, resulting in poor differentiation between body messages and emotions.[5] |
| Amusia or Receptive amusia | Is agnosia for music. It involves loss of the ability to recognize musical notes, rhythms, and intervals and the inability to experience music as musical. |
| Anosognosia | This is the inability to gain feedback about one’s own condition and can be confused with lack of insight but is caused by problems in the feedback mechanisms in the brain. It is caused by neurological damage and can occur in connection with a range of neurological impairments but is most commonly referred to in cases of paralysis following stroke. Those with Anosognosia with multiple impairments may even be aware of some of their impairments but completely unable to perceive others. |
| Apperceptive agnosia | Patients are unable to distinguish visual shapes and so have trouble recognizing, copying, or discriminating between different visual stimuli. Unlike patients suffering from associative agnosia, those with apperceptive agnosia are unable to copy images.[6] |
| Apraxia | Is a form of motor (body) agnosia involving the neurological loss of ability to map out physical actions in order to repeat them in functional activities. It is a form of body-disconnectedness and takes several different forms; Speech-Apraxia in which ability to speak is impaired, Limb-Kinetic Apraxia in which there is a loss of hand or finger dexterity and can extend to the voluntary use of limbs, Ideomotor Apraxia in which the gestures of others can’t be easily replicated and can’t execute goal-directed movements, Ideational Apraxia in which one can’t work out which actions to initiate and struggles to plan and discriminate between potential gestures, Apraxia of Gait in which co-ordination of leg actions is problematic such as kicking a ball, Constructional Apraxia in which a person can’t co-ordinate the construction of objects or draw pictures or follow a design, Oculomotor Apraxia in which the ability to control visual tracking is impaired and Buccofacial Apraxia in which skilled use of the lips, mouth and tongue is impaired.[citation needed] |
| Associative agnosia | Patients can describe visual scenes and classes of objects but still fail to recognize them. They may, for example, know that a fork is something you eat with but may mistake it for a spoon. Patients suffering from associative agnosia are still able to reproduce an image through copying. |
| Auditory agnosia | With Auditory Agnosia there is difficulty distinguishing environmental and non-verbal auditory cues including difficulty distinguishing speech from non-speech sounds even though hearing is usually normal.[7] |
| Autotopagnosia | Is associated with the inability to orient parts of the body, and is often caused by a lesion in the parietal part of the posterior thalmic radiations.[8] |
| Color agnosia | Refers to the inability to recognize a color, while being able to perceive or distinguish it. |
| Cortical deafness | Refers to people who do not perceive any auditory information but whose hearing is intact. |
| Finger agnosia | Is the inability to distinguish the fingers on the hand. It is present in lesions of the dominant parietal lobe, and is a component of Gerstmann syndrome.[9] |
| Form agnosia | Patients perceive only parts of details, not the whole object. |
| Integrative agnosia | This is where one has the ability to recognize elements of something but yet be unable to integrate these elements together into comprehensible perceptual wholes[10] |
| Mirror agnosia | One of the symptoms of Hemispatial neglect. Patients with Hemispatial neglect were placed so that an object was in their neglected visual field but a mirror reflecting that object was visible in their non-neglected field. Patients could not acknowledge the existence of objects in the neglected field and so attempted to reach into the mirror to grasp the object.[11] |
| Pain agnosia | Also referred to as Analgesia, this is the difficulty perceiving and processing pain; thought to underpin some forms of self injury.[12] |
| Phonagnosia | Is the inability to recognize familiar voices, even though the hearer can understand the words used.[13] |
| Prosopagnosia | Also known as faceblindness and facial agnosia: Patients cannot consciously recognize familiar faces, sometimes even including their own. This is often misperceived as an inability to remember names. |
| Semantic agnosia | Those with this form of agnosia are effectively ‘object blind’ until they use non-visual sensory systems to recognise the object. For example, feeling, tapping, smelling, rocking or flicking the object, may trigger realisation of its semantics (meaning).[14] |
| Simultanagnosia | Patients can recognize objects or details in their visual field, but only one at a time. They cannot make out the scene they belong to or make out a whole image out of the details. They literally “cannot see the forest for the trees.” Simultanagnosia is a common symptom of Balint’s syndrome. |
| Social emotional agnosia | Sometimes referred to as Expressive Agnosia, this is a form of agnosia in which the person is unable to perceive facial expression, body language and intonation, rendering them unable to non-verbally perceive people’s emotions and limiting that aspect of social interaction. |
| Somatosensory agnosia | Or Astereognosia[clarification needed] is connected to tactile sense – that is, touch. Patient finds it difficult to recognize objects by touch based on its texture, size and weight. However, they may be able to describe it verbally or recognize same kind of objects from pictures or draw pictures of them. Thought to be connected to lesions or damage in somatosensory cortex.[7] |
| Tactile agnosia | Impaired ability to recognize or identify objects by touch alone.[15] |
| Time agnosia | Is the loss of comprehension of the succession and duration of events.[16] |
| Topographical agnosia | This is a form of visual agnosia in which a person cannot rely on visual cues to guide them directionally due to the inability to recognise objects. Nevertheless, they may still have an excellent capacity to describe the visual layout of the same place[17] |
| Verbal auditory agnosia | This presents as a form of meaning ‘deafness’ in which hearing is intact but there is significant difficulty recognising spoken words as semantically meaningful.[18] |
| Visual agnosia | Is associated with lesions of the left occipital lobe and temporal lobes. Many types of visual agnosia involve the inability to recognize objects. |
| Visual verbal agnosia | Difficulty comprehending the meaning of written words. The capacity to read is usually intact but comprehension is impaired.[19] |
notation
I’ve been interested in different types of “notation” for years, not only because I used to be a musician (until about the age of 19) but also because of an interest in modern dance which began in music school when I discovered John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. Since then I’ve investigated as many forms of notation, musical, dance and otherwise, and come up with a great supply of examples thanks to the local public library. Labanotation, the most-used graphic type of dance notation, is very attractive to me because of its wide variety of orthogonal and diagonal forms. However, it is hardly used anymore thanks to animation and live video, which makes the transmission of choreography easy and accurate.
labanotation
The 1960’s and 70’s saw an unprecedented propagation of new musical notation due to the inefficiency of traditional Western notation in accommodating the newer, complex sounds of serious, modern orchestral and electronic music.
But what is the relation between these forms of graphic language and abstract art? They certainly don’t exist in our minds on the same type of picture plane as a painting, rather more like a type of written language. More to come on this topic for sure.
agnosia
Hearing about faceblindness (prosopagnosia) in the news so often lately (even Chuck Close suffers from it) has lead me to do some investigation into similar mental illnesses classified under the categorical name “agnosia,” which is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Of particular interest to me is semantic agnosia, which is the inability to assign meaning to objects. This is a curious mirror of the disease known as referential thinking, which is basically the compulsion to assign extra meaning to ordinary objects, similar to the scene in the film A Beautiful Mind wherein Russell Crowe’s character thought he was decoding secret messages in newspaper and magazine articles.
I think these two ideas are relevant to painting in that I see a particular type of formally complex abstraction as a scene that appears to have been a representation that became stripped of its signifiers (semantic agnosia). Some of Cezanne’s paintings seem to have been on this trajectory but stopped short of abstraction because we can still recognize trees, buildings, lakes, etc. to such a specificity that we can identify the location of the scene he was painting. Some abstract painters, whose who do not adhere to Abstract-Expressionist orthodoxy (of painting from pure feeling using no real reference) approach painting in this way deliberately, e.g. Richard Diebenkorn and Georgia O’Keefe. The approach I take seems to come to a similar result but through different means: I do not start from a representation and then work towards a simplified set of unrecognizable forms, although the outcome might seem to suggest otherwise.
The second idea, referential thinking, applies to how an audience may want to treat this sort of scene, assigning to abstract forms a meaning which never existed in the first place. Jason Rhoades created large-scale sculptural installations that were “codes” of complex meanings which were all but illegible to the audience. This may be a tendency I want to encourage, but I’m not sure yet. These are all relatively new ideas to me and I am just starting to work out how they are tied to the idea of resemblance in painting.
