Luke Dowd - Photographic Painting / Machinery and Gesture

Luke Dowd

ROD BARTON, LONDON, UK

In his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before(2008), Michael Fried draws attention to the use of workplaces in Jeff Wall’s photography: corners of garages and storerooms whose patinas of grease, worn tools and scuffed surfaces imply intricate histories of toil. Indeed Fried goes further and suggests that such spaces signify belonging in a particularly rich and compelling fashion, with whole worlds being implicated in their distressed textures.

Luke Dowd’s approach in his recent work couldn’t be more different. His show at Rod Barton included eight pieces, several of which drew on his own workspace. For example the four paintings which occupied one corner of the small space – Blue 1,Blue 2, Green and Gold (all works 2011) are apparently derived in some way from a tabletop in Dowd’s studio. Yet instead of supplying the evidence of an authentic, organic life-world that Fried sees in Wall, these images have a spectral, evanescent quality, somewhere between an X-ray and a brass-rubbing. The striations, blots, shadows and spillages of which they are composed merge, smear and deliquesce, defying location even as they appear to stem from it. Likewise their internal spaces are folded in dimensions so convoluted and mobile that the eye seems to move through pulverized, molecular vistas rather than anything scaled to the human world.

By contrast, Unfolded Moon supplies a more stable image. The familiar sphere is split into eight sections, as if a paper napkin has been carefully opened out and smoothed down, retaining its creases. As with the aforementioned pictures, figure and ground mesh and merge, the pocked and pitted surface of the satellite bleeding into the bleachings and fadings of the picture plane. However the central image is intact and serenely dominant, and the fact that this moon has been ‘unfolded’ and made available to us suggests an art that still has ambitions to represent the totality.

This was an exception, however, and the tone of the show remained one of displacement and undecidability, considering the precarious nature of artistic production itself. The most telling piece in this respect was a large canvas in lurid red, depicting a studio window. We can see the wrinkled traces of a sheet blocking out the light which nevertheless comes through, starkly outlining the grid of nine panes. As such, Red Window is a powerful and instantly recognizable image. What’s more, given that the piece is life-sized, the viewer experiences a strong sense of a situated spatial relationship. Standing before it one cannot but feel the incipient torsions of the everyday act of looking through such an aperture. It is all the more disorientating then that we cannot grasp the relation in the conventional way: are we outside looking in, or vice versa? Is the light that throws the frame into relief natural or artificial? One lesson of this image, and many of the others in this thought-provoking show, might be that the very idea of a bounded, stable workplace, guarantor of a consistent self or world, is now an untenable one.

Conor Carville

Stuart Elliott - Painting like the Post-Modern Machinery

What we are first faced with, in Stuart Elliot’s practice, is an invisible mechanism at the heart of the work determining the logic of its production and reception.  His work appears as painting, but is barely painting.  Painting as a category seems too singular a limit from which to deduct any certainty about how the works address you. In this exhibition individual works are combined to constitute relationships and dialogues, opening them up to syntactical readings, which in turn throw into question their inherent qualities.  In Elliot’s practice, the logic of this symbiosis is immanent.   

The paintings themselves offer up a range of constructive strategies. Compositional ruses seem to play out in a number of significant ways; as monochromes; as all-over strategies; as incomplete all-over strategies; or as variants of complex figure-ground formations.  The all-over strategy is clear in Untitled [45].  The repeating ready-made animal print motif constitutes the work’s entire surface.  However the print fabric is translucent rendering an ambiguity between support and surface.  It destabilises any sense of the all-over being situated on an irreducible limit of painting.  Unitary or primary forms do not seem to be the signs under which works like Untitled [45] or all-over gestural works like Untitled [42] are organised.   The contrary is surely the case.  

In many respects these works hinge around the crisis that Minimalism historically engendered; how we think about composition and how it can be said to function in artistic practice and spectatorship.  Donald Judd’s call for the medium category of specific objects was in response to what he saw as the passive address of composed works; painting and plinth-bound sculpture (further polemicised as being specifically European forms).  Similarly Robert Morris’s gestalt-driven works moved the High Modernist avant-garde not so much away from painting but toward strategies of anti-, non- and auto-composition.  Elliot’s positioning of the all-over and the monochrome problematises the conventional readings of these species of painting making them subject to a mode of reception where division and displacement have compositional attributes.  In his hands they are open and fragmentary rather than totalised and reductive (1) bringing to mind artists like Michael Krebber and Wade Guyton (2) .     

              

       Similarly works such as Untitled [47] situate a figure-ground reading within a complex schema.  The masked-off areas, anchored to the edges of the painting, work simultaneously as shape and ground. If hung in proximity to Untitled [38] it becomes clear the shapes are articulations of the ‘negative’ ground of a geometric star form he appropriated from an Islamic tile motif and has used in a number of works.  As five shapes, grounded with open brushwork and different colours they form five possibilities, or fragments, of all-over forms.  The oscillation of readings and the shift from the one to the many, reveal something of the underlying mechanism I allude to in the opening paragraph of this essay. 

Elliot’s grouping of works raises further questions about their address to the spectator.  In conversation he describes each combination of works as being an instance and that each instance transforms how the paintings appear.   I would be inclined to describe this practice as one where the wider rhetoric of the works can be said to be material to his practice; from the production of the individual works to their final presentation.  However Elliot’s description of each instance of the works points to a further quality that seems important in the understanding of his production.  Each painting is strangely neutral or indifferent in the address they make to the viewer.  They are equally instances of how they can be seen to appear as painting.  It is as if the paintings do not dramatically seek the attention of the spectator, rather it is that the spectator must become attentive to them.  This quality can be likened to a ‘turning away’ from the spectator.  I’m tempted to position Elliot’s practice here in line with the Diderot/Friedian mode of absorption but this is not the appropriate place to develop such a discussion.  However the structure of the works, in themselves and their combinations in exhibition, seems to add up to a complex ‘dispositif’ (3) which can be considered as a wider 'mode of address'  strategy (4)  and within which each painting’s constructive strategies are geared.  The spectator is ‘deflected’ (5)  from maintaining a singular position in relation to the works. Instead they combine as a series of fragments serving to offer up yet more possibilities.  If they deflect, it is against being understood holistically, as approaching any sense of resolution.   

This structuring of conventions of painting, abstraction and spectatorship, within a temporality that can be described as instances of endless possibilities, problematises discursive undercurrents that all too often exemplify practices that resemble ‘painting’.  Critically, Elliot’s work has no relation to painting as being in crisis, under threat, dead, resurrected etc.  These are not works that trade in a personification of the afterlife of the genre in the guise of vampires or zombies (6) .   As instances of mutation, they align more with biological metaphors, their endless unfolding and conjoining perhaps point to an evolutionary impulse.  For example the monochrome in Elliot’s work is not the delimiting structure we have come to know as being at large in the ‘wild’.  It is more accurately a ‘trait’, distilled from basic attributes. 

For these reasons Elliot’s practice is not easily assimilated as strictly painting.  Pictorial schema like the all-over, monochrome and figure-ground are played out, or performed, through single paintings as a productive logic and not as figures that demonstrate an inherent conceptual agenda. We are deflected from fetishizing the search for a ground zero of something that is nominally and eternally ‘painting’ toward something that might turn out to be closer to a species than a category.

Mick Finch, 2010

(1) It is worth noting Jean-François Chevrier’s work in formulating how the tableau form can be understood.  In Michael Fried’s book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (Yale University Press, 2008), Chevrier’s formulation is crucial to Fried’s using of this third term when discussing painting and photography, avoiding describing each of these mediums in terms of the qualities of the other. The category of tableau offers the possibility to understand object-image forms as structured in terms of what Chevrier states as fragmentation openness and contradiction (arguably in opposition to totalised form, closure and the literal which are the markers of the plastic paradigm ushered in by Minimalism).

(2) Elliot’s position is closer to Guyton’s in that the address of the works is in terms of the possibilities the relationship of the works to their underlying mechanisms offer.  Krebber plays out strategies within an idea of painting as being fatally inhibited by its closure, the impossibility to open it out beyond its sense of failure.  The incomplete or the fragment in Krebber is thus distinct from Guyton and Elliot in this sense.

(3) This idea of tableau as ‘image-object’ is central to Michael Fried’s recent book in which he explores a structural relationship between painting and photography as associated pictorial forms. The concepts of apparatus (mostly associated with Althusser) and dispositif (associated with Foucault and Agamben) bear many structural similarities to these emerging formulations of the tableau where questions of ideology and signification are at work.

(4) Fried’s work on Diderot in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (University Of Chicago Press,1988) became the structure for his critique of Minimalism in his essay Art and Objecthood that was first published in Artforum in 1967.  Fried used Diderot’s sense of theatricality to typify the condition of spectatorship at work in the Minimalist paradigm with unitary and gestalt structures situating the spectator within the work, constituting a direct address of the work to the spectator.  Absorption, the counterstructure to theatricality, amounts to the work turning away from the spectator.

(5) Deflection is how Elliot himself describes the movement at work in the structure of spectatorship being described here. It is important to note that Fried’s ‘Beholder Discourse’ is an ethical position in relation to modes of address in artistic practice.  Elliot’s position stands very much on the same ethical ground.

(6) I’m thinking here of David Reed in the guise of vampire and Steven Parrino as chainsaw zombie. 

David Rhodes - Concretism 100 years later

Raf Zawistowski - Pastness of Tradition

Nicolas Deshayes - Post-Irony of our Time

Nicolas Deshayes lives and works in London, uk. In 2012, he has had solo exhibitions at Jonathan Viner and Galleries Goldstein, London, as well as a two-person show (with George Henry Longly) at Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris, France. In the last year, he has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including: ‘Original/Copy 2’, Peles Empire, London, and ‘Changing States of Matter’, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy. Deshayes currently has work in ‘Original/Copy 3’, Peles Empire, Cluj, Romania, and will have a solo presentation at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, uk, in February 2013.

The divide between our messy, uncontrollable human bodies and the highly packaged, hygiene-obsessed existences that we’re encouraged to live has reached new extremes in recent years. Much of Nicolas Deshayes’ work addresses this state of affairs via an investigation of surface; the ‘skin’ of his objects has a human or organic quality that belies the industrial man-made materials that they are created from.

In his recent solo show, ‘Browns in Full Colour’, at Jonathan Viner’s new space in central London, large rectangular polystyrene slabs stood at varying angles to the tiled wall, ‘framed’ and fixed to upright mustard-coloured metal poles as if a functional exhibition display in a trade fair. The bright white surface of each piece was highly textured; each was created using a hot wire cutter that moved through the surface, scarring it with an undulating landscape, like the ripples formed on the seabed.

This work was inspired by the subterranean-looking former garage space that houses the gallery – a little like a Victorian bath house, covered in green, brown and cream tiles. Indeed, the title of one work, Soho Fats (2012), refers to the blocks of congealed fat that have been found to line the walls of Soho’s sewers. The organic form created is at odds with polystyrene, which is a non-biodegradable, permanent environmental pest. Invented in the mid-19th-century, it was first used industrially during World War I. It is now so ubiquitous we barely notice it: from equipment packaging to architectural maquettes, its proliferation has gone hand-in-hand with the technological revolutions of the last half-century. It can be both a protective skin and an architectural form – qualities Deshayes has purposefully played with, alongside alluding to the residues and detritus left by us all.

Consider the sculptures of the Post-Minimalist and feminist artists of the 1970s: the latex and rubber used by Eva Hesse and Lynda Benglis that provided an antidote to their Minimalist and AbEx predecessors – such as Contingent (1969) by Hesse, eight sheets of rubberized cheese cloth hanging in a grid of rectangles from the ceiling, and Bounce 1 (1969) by Benglis, consisting of poured latex in multiple colours forming a swirly abstraction – are now fading fast, in need of constant conservation in order to preserve them. Much of Deshayes’ work suggests similar malleable organic forms, yet his sculptures are nearly always made from more permanent industrial products (favoured by the Minimalists) such as plastic and aluminium, using various processes – such as vacuum forming or anodizing – to mould and transform their properties.

The results can be seen in Slugs (2012): a visceral, textured, vacuum-formed clear plastic mound – made by pouring plaster into a mould and moving it around when it was in a state between liquid and solid, so that it stretches and slumps – contrasts with the slick palette of turquoise, purple and yellow, which looks like spray-paint, but is actually formed by a chemical reaction with the aluminium. In the same way that vacuum forming and heat produce sculpture and line, this could be described as a form of painting, producing a colour palette reminiscent of the 1980s: the decade of the artist’s childhood. Once again, Deshayes’ work gives rise to a purposeful contraction: the surface of the vacuum-formed plastic has an organic appearance that borders upon the sexual, whilst being a distinctly man-made product.

On the floor of the same show, stood vestibules for human excrement: Deshayes had re-created the carpet rolls (Paris Rag, 2012, made from carpet and polyester resin) that still line Parisian gutters, seeping up and directing the surplus cleaning water. The presence of these rags has intrigued artists throughout the last century – both Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Eugène Atget photographed these strange, feral specimens. Framing, architectural support and spatial placement are also important within Deshayes’ body of work, as the cellular, skin-like textures are sited specifically in relationship to the viewer’s body – for example, Drifter (2012) is hung from the ceiling, and Acids(2012) are placed at crotch height.

In his seminal essay ‘Specific Objects’ (1965), Donald Judd wrote: ‘Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. Usually it has been related, closely or distantly, to one or the other. The work is diverse, and much in it that is not in painting and sculpture is also diverse. But there are some things that occur nearly in common.’ This description, of something that exists between painting and sculpture, could easily be applied to Deshayes. Yet, the ‘images’ he creates with the objects he makes could only have been made today, as his practice is equally related to the proliferation of stock photography via the Internet. The slick, plasticized quality of food products found in contemporary advertising informed the artist’s early work. Deshayes’ series ‘Supplement’ (2009–ongoing) comprises glossy images of different food products which he created by ‘re-making’ adverts from magazines in his studio: his repetition heightens the food-porn aesthetic – glutinous, highly styled and pristine – of high-end supermarket adverts and cookery programmes, eradicating the ‘natural’, eclectic qualities of the produce (which could be equated to the botoxed faces readily presented as ‘ideal’ beauties in the media of today). While human beings do not feature physically in his work, their qualities are always present – further emphasizing the friction between the permanence of the materials used and the corporeality of being human.

Kathy Noble

John Armleder at Dairy Art Centre

John Summers and Lyle Perkins at Studio1.1

In the Age of Appropriation (as good a name for it as any), the found object becomes the core of the matter: the thrown-away, the not-needed, the landfill-ready, bio-degradable or not, transforms into the focus of the market. Whether we – as artist or audience – have planned it to or not. Taken from life, the objects take on a life of their own. Materials built up meticulously yet of no intrinsic value – the value accruing through personal history and acts of transformation – standing in anti-materialistic defiance to the pervading atmosphere of Capital.

Perkins’ precisely observed watercolours of homeless persons’ carts from the streets of Los Angeles, the world capital of rootless/ruthless consumerism, are devoid of ground, shadow, or human presence yet nevertheless speak entirely of the human need to possess, comprehend and however idiosyncratically, control our world. The means these ‘transients’  have is limited, shored up in shopping trolleys – ironic (satiric?) chariots of ‘worthless’ (i.e. in all likelihood scavenged rather than purchased) goods.

Summers, born in Colorado, re-configures objects, manipulating materials which simultaneously lose, exchange and regain their function, wrest a new meaning from the incoherent random flotsam in our wake.

Why do they do it, these transients, these artists? How far outside society or the society of Art do we take up our position? Yes, you… Who’s around even to question? The fabricators themselves of course having retired into invisiblity – their statement left behind in the objects and detritus they assemble.

Art focuses our attention, makes things visible – both Summers and Perkins work on the flipside of consumerism, placing the disregarded rubble of this fragile life and art centre stage… countering society’s/art’s prevailing climate with distinctly anti-capitalist, un-American activities… recording and reflecting dissent by the simple fact embedded in these materials, transformed fastidiously by Perkins, or  with something close to a manic mockery – or menace? – in the case of Summers. Art as the continuation of politics by other means.

Natasha Peel - Russian Constructivism through 100 years

Marco Palmieri - Modernist Painting meets Post-Modern Appropriation

Charlie Billingham - Classical motives and Reproduction

HaYoung Kim - Commodification and Aesthetics

Katy Kirbach - Meta Design

You know those markets you get in European towns and cities? The ones selling cheap fabrics, loads of bad underwear, hardware and brick-a-brack? The clothing you find at them is synthetic, elastic and sheer. Stretchy tops, novelty tights, and leggings. Where designer label logos, motifs and prints have been assumed then skewed, and repeated across a variety of dubious colour combinations.

These small paintings take me there – to those market stalls, at a push to the High Street. To not-at-all-very-sexy underwear, to animal print clothing that might pass were it Roberto Cavalli, but this is mass-produced tat, not designer wear. The pattern shared by all of them tries to be slinky, it teases, it’s tacky. Girls out on a Saturday night.

These paintings are a bit like fabric swatches. And I’m enjoying imagining the clothing made from them, and the people wearing it. I’m enjoying all the ‘bad’ choices – acid greens with magentas, girly pink and peach, or colour which feels like it shimmers off the surface of petrol oil. And the hurry – the hurry of a serial print dashed across a handful of hastily-chosen colour pairings, for a line of clothing you’ll see pile-high and torn-through, and then quickly replaced before the next season.

It’s funny that I go to these associations before thinking about ‘painting’ per se. Because after all they are paintings: stretched and primed canvas, paint. Despite their mechanical appearance, they are very “hand-made”. On close inspection the black pattern undulates into globby pools of paint – thick enough that you could pick the skin off. Katy described to me how she found a piece of upholstery fabric at a large market in Rome, and by covering it in paint, used it to print directly onto the canvasses which had already been washily treated with the checkerboard patterns of colour. The scratches, smudges, and thicker areas of black come from her hands and fingers pressing through the same off-cut, like mono-printing through a textile.

And yet for all of the texture and blobs and gesture and touch, there is some overall sense of remove. I end up not really knowing what I am looking at. I know I am looking at paintings – and I think a bit about the more decorative works of Christopher Wool, or perhaps Josh Smith – but because of a lack of image or any one painting being privileged over another – I feel these works may as well be things, with functions – be it the selections of samples for t-shirts waiting to be produced for a fashion label, or any other fabric design ready to join the circulating mass. They assert themselves in number, but otherwise there is a weird temporality.

I can’t help but think of a market again, specifically Camden Market in London when I look at the two larger paintings. Patched and stitched fat areas of lurid green, pink, blue and purple have been scribbled over with tarry dribbled black – they make me think of the shop Cyberdog there which sells trance music and cyber clothing, and specialises in fluorescent dance wear. You would find these colour combinations there.

I can barely think of a less probable place for Katy to be found shopping than Cyberdog.

If you knew her, you’d know what I mean. When questioned about why these colours, why this kind of ‘taste’, she voices her own surprise at herself. It’s almost in spite of herself that she plucks loud vulgar colour. One almost gets the sense that she wants the paintings to behave in a way that she wouldn’t risk. She could never leave the house in the colours trying to shout out from these two works. And nor could the paintings leave the studio before being “covered up” by a black knitted scrawl.

Text by Sara Knowland