Lance Winn

 Painting and the Digital

I was thinking on the way here that the 19th and 20th centuries were really defined by how we were going to engage with mechanization and capitalism (they relate); probably culminating in the defining event of the 20th century, WW2, which epitomized both the ideological and mechanical questions of the period. And that the 21st century is being defined by how we are going to address (or not address) digital and mobile technologies (there seem to be less questions about global capitalism...)-in a sense our relationship to technology has been the umbrella over other important questions (like ecology, etc) since at least Marx, articulated by Chaplin in “Modern Times,” and driving Benjamin’s defining question of “what is progress?”; I heard someone on NPR recently claim “our job in the 21st century will be to define the boundaries of what we consider “real” now” essentially where we are going to draw our own line. And painting has contended with these things since their outset, both in its continual redefinition since the advent of photomechanical processes, and in the things it has tried to record.

I continue to go to look at paintings because I feel like they can speak to conditions that other forms of representation and object making cannot, and I am working to find some language to articulate those conditions for myself. A language that could embrace the broad range of paintings and painters that interest me. So under the presumption that painting should do something, what should it do in light of the most pervasive reproductive technology that the world has known to date? How does it act within a world of images and imaging that is more mobile, immediate, social, and numerous than ever before? I would like to work to define what painting might actually speak to in our current environment. So much has been written about the “impossibility of painting”-as in “Casualism” and the “Provisional”– Rubenstein “At a certain moment, in a certain studio, it appears that great painting may be impossible, that painting of any kind may be impossible. (Nonetheless, for whatever reasons pertaining to a particular painter at a particular time, painting must be done, must go on.)” Mimicking Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I must go on...” It is this type of strange remnant of romance that makes so many of the recent essays, claiming new Painting’s successes as its pathetic incapacity, that add to the dilution of the discussion of paintings. It is all very dramatic and kills the philosophical possibility in painting- narrowing an already dwindling possibility–not because painting cannot speak to contemporary life, but because we have not continued to build a rich and complex vocabulary of the physical/experiential world? In “After Art” David Joselit claims a “fundamentalist effort to restore aura at a juncture when the potential of image circulation and the population explosion of images is irreversible.” If this is true I don’t really think there is a place for painting, beyond commodity. Celebrating the need for a new kind of valuation/criticality(?), he declares that “Instead of a radiating nimbus of authenticity and authority u, we have the value of saturation, of being everywhere at once. In place of aura, there is buzz”– ––But I am not sure that this type of “information” is really anything that painting does very well. If a painting, or other works of art, are just a place-holder, no

different as picture or object, for starting another conversation; I am not really that interested. We are eliminating the experiential, and other forms of “knowing” in light of “information” as knowledge. There are other types of discourse. I think that there is a potential language for the critical reception of paintings, asking whether they are fulfilling some of what we want them to do in the “Information Age”–all debatable, but it might also allow for a deeper conversation about what painting can give us at a time when it does not seem necessary for the “adding” of new pictures to a image-world that does not seem to need them. That “possible” discourse must return, in some way, to aesthetics- but it would require a complicated consideration of aesthetic’s ideas and language that has been fairly well dismissed by post- modernist semiology, lacking the subtlety to recognize that the history of aesthetics does not necessarily call for some universally agreed answer to what solves the “problem” of aesthetic experience, and why it might or might not matter. Physical experience has been fairly well dismissed in the culture at large, and the question might be “what is going to happen when the experiential has been subsumed by the screen?” Is there evidence that it is going any other way? Talk about students not caring about the bodily experience of art.

I believe that part of Painting’s unique form of communicating lies in its inability to be assimilated into the digital. While they may be part of the culture of picture production, the paintings I care about, are specifically unable to be appreciated through a flat screen or printed reproduction. It is the very object-ness of paintings, and the way that they reveal themselves in person, that make them an entirely different type of information system to me. So while painting might, and likely must, deal with new sources of images and new forms for the distribution of pictures, it must also speak to what differentiates the way we experience images.

What interests me as a painter is the translating of contemporary experience through a material and the limits of the body. These adjustments are what give a language to contemporary Painting. And this, for me, links all of painting as a “coming to grips” with the limits of what we can know, and the desire to know more. I feel like this is where painting continues to tell me something.

Technology is nothing particularly new to painting, since at least the use of the silkscreen with Warhol/Rauschenberg painters have incorporated new methods for translating images into their work. And it has always been about the development of a greater vocabulary, not ease. While someone like Guyton might have stripped away the content from the vocabulary of reproduction, the subtext of error that Warhol and Rauschenberg sought to exploit using the silk-screen post- expressionism, is still the driving visual of Guyton’s canvas fed through the digital printer. While I find the particular minimalism a bit dull, its description by Luke Smythe, certainly hints at a poetic condition that painting takes on in myriad ways– “Upon crossing the threshold of actuality, the Platonic perfections of Guyton’s figures begin to crumble, yielding images that are stigmatized and battered by their sudden encounter with the real.” Paintings are where ideas/dreams are exposed to the real. A dialectical proposition that comes to an unsettling

synthesis.

Coming very close to Richter’s description of the process of painting in an interview with Robert Storr “painting is the form of the picture you might say. The picture is the depiction, and painting is the technique for shattering it...” So with regards to the photographic–the photograph is image that, when translated to painting, becomes a story (narrative). And story might be told in a history of “adjustments,” instead of a linear narrative.

One thing that painting has done is to respond to the image world of a particular time, and to reflect on how the artist thought about that image world. Painting has left a record of the things around it (it seems important to me that this record is still and lasting?). Painting continues because the world continues, and as new image worlds develop and are invented there are new conditions to respond to and new ways are developed to respond to those environments. What painting does is to pull those things away from their natural environment and let us consider them as conditions (hint, I am not interested in the art as life thing) Painting is one way that these conditions are recorded, without the neutrality of the lens or the machine- so that, in ways similar to the novel, we see a uniquely singular and personal response to the world. Painting has been forced to redefine itself and wonder what its purpose might be for nearly 200 years. Other disciplines, especially those not dealing with representation, have not had to contend with the assault of reproductive technologies that have, until fairly recently, dealt primarily with the two-dimensional realm. Part of what makes Painting interesting to me are the spaces it has sought to find a way to keep happening. Of course I say this as painting may be facing the most difficult assault on the very thing it has to offer, which is the aura of time and place.

I don’t think that painting can get anywhere by simply “working against,” or describing what is NOT digital/screen/or light, but must, in some way, use this language to speak to something more than deconstruction. So, my questions concern what conditions painting might speak to, how its particular conditions might allow it, as a discipline, to reflect on certain aspects of being in the world- and might even be something that creates empathy and guides us back to a different relationship with the physical world. Because the content of painting, to me, is not in the image, but in the construction of the image. This helps us learn how to read time into objects. Paint, as liquid plasticity, is particularly good at capturing that. The digital negates form, and particularly the ability of form to become content. This flattening of objects into “content” is something that I think good painting resists.

I think that painting has the unique ability to convey the construction of the image as a meaningful language. The poetics of the construction of the image/picture (these can vary wildly, encompassing my own constellation-say from Manet, through Duchamp to Johns and Richter, and on to Celmins, etc... to the more expressionistic painters, from Pollock to Guston, or Cecily Brown’s (more or less obvious) erotics of paint/painting) are the set of physical decisions that the artist

has made to reach the final object/image. This achealogy of thought, without having to be read into as expressive, can be experienced as a belief system that responds to the image. When these two, the construction of the image and the nature of the image itself, start speaking to each other they create a language that might uniquely speak to aspects of the human condition (consider how Johns speaks about his decision to erase or “not treat” parts of the painting as an act of painting- that one could have bad and good (painting) days, and that the work could reflect doubt, skepticism, and a whole host of other questions as part of lived experience). This is where I think provisionality and casualism, as theories, fail, as they do not account for the drive and desire of the early practicioners (ab ex, johns, richter, guston) “quote by Johns”

To go a step further, if one is able to speak to the distance/coldness (see ideas of “impression”) of perception and the incredible intimacy of touch (of putting paint on canvas) then painters might use the medium to speak to our history of being (epistemology/ontology) that may be how we exist in and “know” the world, or be able to speak to “how we know the world,” or “what we can’t know about the world.”

The act of translation and re-construction takes advantage of painting’s ability to describe retinal impressions- to speak to the surface of things (what we can know through observation) and the way we impose our mind/knowledge/history/culture into that surface. It is no wonder that artists from Monet to Whistler have used the surface of water or the darkness of night as the background when they wanted to “open-up” paint, just as so many painters today take advantage of technological developments to find new forms that open up the massive catalogue of images and motifs that painting has dealt with.

We are in a unique position, with the digital/technological imaging, where we are able to do and see things that we have never experienced before, whether it be the phone camera, or infrared or thermal imaging that allows us to “see” outside the optical register, and yet these accentuate what we have always known about representation, and heighten the affect of the distancing, making us aware that we are not there... thermal is just looking at heat, the color is completely unnatural and determined. This is the mediated nature of images today, and painters and paintings respond.

I look at Painting as a sort of theater of the material world (the theatrical being the insertion of the history of human thought/belief), it can head us back to the meaning embedded in the physical world (it is a material culture). But the potential of the physical objects, and the type of discourse that has been developed around the material world, is certainly in jeopardy of being lost, if not entirely dismissed, as our sources for information/meaning become increasingly virtual.

So maybe one thing painting should work to do is to have to be seen. To have physical presence that one journeys to be around.(be unreproducible (Brian)) I understand that the keystone of the digital world is democratic access, but this denies a different and important side of the aura (beyond disputed notions of the “author”) which is the power of having to mobilize to be with something, and the way we prepare ourselves to experience something on a different level when we have committed to the journey to be with it. Why would we treat art so very differently than mobilizing to hear live music? Simply because less people can experience it at once? This does not always have to result in some kind of sublime experience, but can be as simple as having process unveiled on the side of the canvas, understanding the scale/speed of mark as it relates to the body of the maker, understanding glare as one moves around an object, etc. This is where Joselit’s rhetoric of “buzz,” breaks down for me. This rhetoric is fairly well devoid of emotional, visceral experience; instead returning to the language of information, and socio-political mobilization. I think that there might be other aspects of the human condition worth exploring and I do not see the required physical presence as a failure of painting, but as a distinct and powerful feature of it against the homogenizing and in-experiential aspect of the digital public library of images that populate the cloud; that the things the still, constructed object does are part of its powerful language that enriches our relationship to the world. And that we can use some of what we have learned from the virtual world to speak to back at the body (embodied?). As Richard Nash describes of the technology of the book “The lack of video, the lack of audio, the lack of ways to change the forking outcomes of plot (what is rather crudely referred to as “interactivity”) is a feature of literature, not a bug.”i How can we think about the physical realities of painting, and consider what many have described as its failures as its most important features.

*end-note–Finally, if, in this Information Age, we are unable to look at individual paintings and assess their individual power, and, instead, must look at the artist’s “project” (Schwabsky) then are we essentially disregarding the potential power of the actual created objects in lieu of the cult of personality which has dominated since Duchamp. This has the deep potential to descend into an intellectual (academic) game. If painting becomes fully academic, and yet has no language of criticality, then it will/has become totally impotent. Or as Hickey, by way of Sontag, claims, “the “erotics” of art have been wholly supplanted by the language of bureaucratic explanation”–or paintings will be replaced by pictures of paintings?ii

i Richard Nash. “What is the Business of Literature?” The Virginia Quarterly Review. Spring 2014
ii Dave Hickey. “A World Like Santa Barbara.” Art Issues no63 20-3 Summer 2000Luke Smythe. “Pigment vs. Pixel:Painting in an era of Light-Based Images.” Art Journal Winter 2013