Documents of Contemporary Art, MATERIALITY
Picked out sections of each text that sum up text/most relevant to the importance of materiality in my own work.
Introduction//How to Be Complicit with Materials, Petra Lange-Berndt
"From a critical perspective, the term 'material' describes not prime matter but substances that are always subject to change, be it through handling, interaction with their surroundings, or the dynamic life of their chemical reactions. It is therefore a political decision to focus on the materials of art: it means to consider the processes of making and their associated power relations, to consider the workers - whether they are in factories, studios or public spaces, whether they are known or anonymous - and their tools and spaces of production." pg 12
"to address process of making is still associated with formalism, while materials are thopught of in terms of concrete, direct and inhert physicality, carrying imprinted messages." pg 12
"Materiality is one of the most contested concepts in contemporary art and is often sidelined in critical academic writing." pg 12
Dieter Hoffman-Axthelm, Theory of Artistic Work 1974
"The question of material is [..] the question of its use. Of course this does not mean that material should be considered as something neutral' pg 72
'Instead of a critique of materials which remains true to the personal economy of art, the transformation of material should ultimately lie in the impossibility of dealing with materials through various types of critique concerning materials. This means assessing the difficulty of the work and the enjoyment of working with the material instead of the appearance, outwith society, of ease and availability.' pg 74
"art historians such as Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Briony Fer have focused on art that explores processes of embodiment, touch and the materialization of thought processes." pg 13(the paint is a direct depiction of my thought process)
"As literary scholar Werner Mittenzwei writes, in the early twentieth century [...] there was a hope for a left-wing Materialasthetik - a materialist aesthertic which would ask what revolutionary potential the contemporary materials produced by society might bear in the realm of art. In this context, rather than material production leading to the fabrication of consumer goods, the possibilities of materials should be set free without turning them into commodities." pg 15
Monika Wagner, Material//2001 (bit of a history and modern day view to material)
"[...] Discussions of 'material' as an aesthetic category are recent. In its day-to-day applications, material belongs to a lowly sphere. [...] In general, material, unlike matter, refers only to natural and artificial substances intended for further treatment." pg 26
"The substances and objects that consitute material are subject to transformation through processing, and hence they reveal information about the forces of production at the time, or a specific historical technique. In a narrower sense, material is the stuff which provides the parent substance for artistic creation. From this perspective, material - like matter - is part of a reciprocal relationship with form and idea, the bywords for creative invention." pg 26
"In an idealist tradition within aesthetic theory that referenced Plato and Aristotle, material was constantly regarded as the base and counterpart to artistic creativity, which, even in its most precious forms, had to be transcended or transformed by art as activity." pg 27
"[...] Material is understood as an information carrier; in this interpretation, material is a medium." pg 27
Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai Manifesto//1956
"[...] Materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance, so that, instead of just presenting their own material self, they take on the appearance of something else." pg 33 art works are frauds, illusions by human hand. My work counteracts this
Georges Didi-Huberman, The Order of Material: Plasticities, malaises, Survivals//1999
"[...] Material belongs to an order of concrete and direct evidence, in so far as it is the physical quality of every work of art: it tells us, quite simply, what the art object is made of." pg 42
Pennina Barnett, The Alchemist's Workshop//1997
"I am not concerned with endings and beginnings, but with process and transformation. Yet if one has to start somewhere, why not a workshop bench, cluttered with tools and materials [...] Or the white space of commodification: an art gallery" pg 75
Robert Morris, Anti Form//1968
"The process of 'making itself' has hardly been examined. It has only recieved attention in terms of some kind of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. [...] Of the Abstract Expressionists, only Pollock was able to recover process and hold onto it as part of the end form of the work. Pollock's recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role of both material and tools in the making. The stick that drips paint is a tool that acknowledges the nature of the fluidity of paint. Like any other tool, it is still one that controls and transforms matter. but unlike the brush, it is in far greater sympathy with matter because it acknowledges the inherent tendancies and properties of that matter. In some ways Louis was even closer to matter in his use of the container itself to pour the fluid." pg 92
"To think that painting has some inherent optical nature is ridiculous. It is equally silly to define its 'thingness' as acts of logic that acknowledge the edges of the support. The optical and the physical are both there. Both Pollock and Louis were aware of both. Both used directly the physical, fluid properties of paint. Their 'optical' forms resulted from dealing with the propertires of fluidity and the conditions of a more or less absorptive ground. The forms and the order of their work were not a priori to the means." pg 93
"The visability of process in art ocured with the saving of sketches and unfinished work in the High Renaissance. In the nineteenth century both Rodin and Rosso left traces of touch in finished work. Like the Abstract Expressionists after them, they registered the plasticity of material in autobiographical terms. It remained for Pollock and Louis to go beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself." pg 93
Mel Bochner, Elements from Speculation//1970
"There is no art which does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony." pg 168
Nicolas Bourriaud, Blue Company, or Yves Klein Considered as World Economy//2000
"Klein's practice is indexed on the present instant. His activity as a monochrome painter thus comes into play at the precise moment when the material stabilizes on the surface of the canvas. At this moment the canvas is 'charged', or fails charge, with immaterial energy. If this 'impregnation' does not take place it's woth nothing. Once done, the canvas has no other value than that of prolonging this brief instant of creation" pg 170
"Klein's paintings are delayed broadcasts of an event that has already taken place." pg 170
"he directs the women he covers with blue paint for the anthropometric ceremonies. Throughout it all he wears white gloves, a tuxedo, a bow tie: foreman of the visible, he orchastrates the impersonal labour. He does not touch the material." pg 171
Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years...//1973
"Other artists were more concerned with allowing materials rather than systems to determine the form of their work." pg 181
"It isn't really a matter of how much materiality a work has, but what the artist is doing with it." pg 182
Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art//1968
"conceptual art that emphasizes the thinking process almost exclusively. As more and more work is designed in the studio but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the work of art." pg 176
"The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroad that may well turn out to be two roads to one place, though they appear to have come from two sources: art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion." pg 176
Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art, From Futurism to the Present//1979
Gives factual information about Klein's first gallery performance.
Amelia Jones, Body Art Performing the Subject
Whole chapter on Pollock - 'Pollockian Performative'
Namuth photos were significant images, overwhelmed the article, presented art as a performance
"shift in conception and enactment of this subject" pg 53
(See Artists - Pollock)
Documents of Contemporary Art, PAINTING
Texts start in 1981 onwards, contemporary ideas
Introduction// What has already been said about painting is still not enough - Terry R. Myers
"Painting since the end of the nineteenth century is inextricable from the parallel (if not superceding) story of the perpetual cycle of its deaths and rebirths in the face of photography, conceptual art, installation, digital imaging technologies, the world wide web, or plain lack of interest." pg 12
"no one could argue that painting captures our attention as it has in the past, despite how much of it is still produced and acknowledged." pg 12
"what has been said about painting since its last major re-emergence at the end of the 1970s is inspereable from the continuation of a (vicious) cycle of its death and rebirth." pg 12
"many of the texts in this book take on the 'expanded field' of painting, because there can be no doubt their boundaries have become anything but restrictive." pg 16
The Painting Undone, Meyer Raphael Rubinstein [1991]
Supports/Surfaces art movement: "Supports/Surfaces were close to the Nice branch of Nouveau Realisme, but this can mostly be laid to georgraphy: Supports/Surfaces shared none of Nouveau Realisme's passion for the detritus of everyday life, and while the Nouveaux Realistes went out of their way to incorporate non-art materials, the artists of Supports/Surfaces made a point of only using the traditionally constituent elements - albeit elaborated to the extreme - of that most retrograde of mediums, painting." "in fact they owed more to American colour field painting than to their Nouveau Realiste neighbours." pg 82
"the artists of Supports/Surfaces were primarily concerned with the problems of painting" pg 83
"The Supports/Surfaces artists were driven by the feeling that painting had still not come to terms with its most basic conventions - hence, of course, the group's name, which proclaimed the materialist basis of the project. These artists held that despite Greenberg's exhortations, most painters showed little concern with the essential conditions of their medium. They thus saw their task as using the work of art to 'show what was hidden
Painting and Its Others: In the Realm of the Feminine, Shirley Kaneda [1991]
"Barnett Newman always knew when his paintings were completed, but Jackson Pollock could only intuit. Pollock the quintessential male painter, literalized the sign of authroity of the maker over that of the receiver, pitted the unconscious against the conscious. The surrender of the conscious mind allows the unconscious to articulate itself." pg 78
In Conversation with Johnathan Watkins, Katharina Grosse [2002]
KG "there are certain habits that I've acquired, like starting in corners, or making fast movements with a light coat of paint" pg 161
"What I anticipate before making a spray painting looks very different to what I actually do. I might have all sorts of clever ideas beforehand, but then when I do it it's not just executing something made up in my mid Everything I do in my painting is based on a certain thought, followed by the next and so on - that's what makes it so different from photography." pg 161
JW "I've noticed that you don't move around a space systematically, but rather your activity seems like an idiosyncratic way of marking out territory. The first marks you make are like traces of an initial exploration of the space you are occupying. And there is a certain drama in the fact that you are alone in a certain blankness, with overalls, mask and other protective gear, you look as if you've landed on the moon." KG "I'm very aware recently that I'm not actually in the space. What I'm wearing actually isolates me from the space." JW "This is very different to the classic idea of Jackson Pollock, with t-shirt and jeans, and bare feet, bent over a huge canvas on the floor. The idea of distance you describe is not one conventionally associated with Abstract Expressionism." KG "and using spray paint I don't actually touch the space." pg 161
Figures of Defiguration: Four These on Abstraction, Egenhofer [2008]
"Critics from Clement Greenerg to Yve-Alain Bois have thought the modernist critque of representation as the movement of a self-reflection through which painting always also exhibits its character as a medium."pg 213
"The medium is identified with the material support, whose real mode of presence and sinificative performance is examined" pg 213
"Because the concept of form, which delineates the horizon of the work's self reflection, remains undetermined, this movement of self reflection regularly degenerates (thus in radical painting) into an idolatry of the de facto material." pg 213
Sergej Jensen, Distanz
Show me yourself, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson
'complete erasure of traditional painting methods, and the subsequent discovery of materials that already had dirt or stains on them. He began to use those pre-existing marks as compositional elements' pg 7
'fresh approach to minimalist painting' pg 7
'jensens process centre's around physical acts, including cutting, stretching, sewing, bleaching, dyeing, washing, mixing.' pg 7
'less about the materials or the fabrics and more about finding new ways to make a painting.'pg 7
'his paintings are inherently resourceful and reveal the economy of their making' pg 7
'Jensen is interested in the framing of his paintings and allows the space to extend beyond its wooden support.' pg 7
'although each painting exists as an individual gesture, they commingle to form a complex narrative of passage, loss,and hope' pg 7
'had been systematically removing the conventions of painting from his work, removing even gesture and paint itself.' pg 7
'by embracing the paint that had seeped through the surface of the structure, he gave up a little control, and paint itself was allowed back into his work' pg 7/8
'comparable to Ad Reinhardt's cross paintings, in which deeper and longer looking reveals hidden elements among the compositions.' pg 8
'by employing found materials, the artist extends the surface of his works all along the edges and onto the back. The spatial utilization recalls the work of Robert Ryman, who paints out onto the edges and leaves masking tape and other tools of his practice visable.'pg8
'Untitled 2007, was not originally intended to be a painting, but rather was cloth lying on the ground to protect the floor underneath the painting the artist was working on.' pg 9
"Sergej Jensen is a painter. Yet there is probably no other other painter who is more intent on not painting."pg 10
Catherine Wood - A Bigger Splash, Painting after Performance
entanglement of painting and performance
under-explored
"radically broke down the conventions of painting by replacing pictoriality and composition with slashed, dripped upon, shot-at or cut-up canvases: new 'arenas for action'."
"the painted body of the artist or performer"
performances impact upon painting and vice versa
".. whereas traditional easel painting was based upon the single artist working upright before the canvas in a one-to-one relationship that was mirrored by the viewer, various vital approaches to contemporary painting are based in social or collaborative situation that tilt and shift that orientation."
Hockney's painting, A Bigger Splash [1967] took 2 weeks, the splash was intricately constructed not a spontaneous splatter.
'Double frame' - "combination of the rectangular space of the canvas and the space of its lens-based documentation, within which an image of the canvas would be embedded" eg. Pollock, Namuth photos, Allan Kaprow (The Legacy of Jackson Pollock 1958) http://www.belgiumishappening.net/home/publications/1958-00-00_kaprow_legacypollock
Kaprow - pollock marked end of painting as we knew it, some of the earliest performance happenings
'literal tracks of a man's movement across a canvas'
Harold Rosenberg - canvas arena in which to act
Paul Schimmel, Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object pg 18 '[Pollock] transformed the artists role from that of bystander outside of the canvas to that of an actor whose very actions were its subject"
"The act of creating is itself the principle factor, over and above symbolic or realistic representation" pg 13
Action and Actionism: "experimental practices... which take painting's material basis and conceptual capacity as a core framework to work with and radically challenge, but always performatively and in relation to photography and video." pg 14
Klein - fancy events, live audience, musicians, champagne
paint as a specifically material surface that covers, masks, and changes things
page 23 and 24 good
'simultaneously inside and outside his work' pg 26
The Artists Body: Themes and Motives, Tracey Warr
Pollock and After, The Critical Debate Francis Frascina
Chapter 8, Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting - David and Cecile Shapiro
Thinking Through Painting: Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas
Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting
Behind the Eyes: Making Pictures
The Indiscipline of Painting
The
Indiscipline of Painting considers abstract paintings role in contemporary art,
it explores how artists since the 1960s to the present have continued to keep
abstract painting relevant and critical within the growing art world. how the selected artists in the exhibition
are able to interpret the history of the medium in order to make space in which
to work, but also how they will liberate themselves from its historical legacy.
The exhibition includes works from Frank Stella, Gerhard Richter, Bernard
Frieze, Kathatrina Grosse, Blinky Palermo, Steven Parrino and Robert Ryman.
"Ryman, as he has always maintained, wanted to see 'how the paint worked'." [page 27]
"Ryman tested constitutive materials, queried technical strategies, and observed the ways that paint moves across a supporting surface." [page 28]
talks a lot about Alfred Barr and connection to Ryman - chapter 1
"In all cases, the works show a curiosity about paint and the ways that it might move across a support" [page 62]
"Although Ryman came to understand his painting as realist as opposed to abstract, at this stage he did not want to replicate nature or someone else's art but wanted to learn by doing things for himself." [page 63]
"paint demonstrably pulled, spread, pushed, and coaxed along the murky surface" [page 63]
"experimentation with pressure, direction, and viscosity."
Ryan uses his signature as an element of the painting. Part of the painting, not something usually seen as separate.
"Painting becomes a less static or grounded medium and a more fluid, material site for the continual testing and working of conventions and the effects that these conventions or properties produce." [page 105]
"What a painting is becomes inextricable from what a painting does... paint alone is not sufficient to produce a painting: it is necessary but not sufficient. A painting needs paint, a support, a delimitation of that support in the form of an edge, a wall (a viewing context), and someone to see it - to register it as a painting"[page 105-106]
Definitions of 'support': "The solid substance or material on which a painting is executed." [page 111]
"the question of what painting is can be answered only by, in, and as painting." [page 113]
"A painting is made a painting for Ryman through his interplay of paint and support" [page 114]
