October 31, 2006
October 30, 2006
October 29, 2006
October 28, 2006
October 27, 2006
October 26, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
All fourteen scans of the twenty seven Mauai Sketchbook drawings are compiled on a single page.
Two Artists Talking
There is a lively ongoing conversation between Joanne Mattera and myself at Two Artists Talking.
Ernie Kwiat Monster Drawings
Ernie Kwiat's Monster Drawing march towards Halloween continues, and continues, and continues... Good stuff here.
October 25, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 24, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 23, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 22, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 21, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 20, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 19, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 18, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 17, 2006
Don Voisine: R-Value at Abaton Garage
| Below are four pieces of writing related to Don Voisine's recent exhibition, "R-Value," at Abaton Garage. In late August Don Voisine emailed an exhibition announcement[1]. I emailed him some observations and questions[2]. I thought his reply[3] was worthy of a broader audience; he also emailed me some images. Finally, Jim Long's essay[4] from the catalog for this show is included. I thought it would be interesting to gather all of these pieces together in one place to better understand what Don is up to. After putting all of these pieces together, something else occurred to me: in addition to an interest in Don's work and how it's discussed, I realized that in gathering all of these pieces the result is a kind of documentation of multiple views of a single thing. There are five views of Don's work via three different media, public and private: [1] the press release (email and web); [2] my observations (email); [3] Don's response and explanation (email); [4] Jim's essay (published in the catalog, which Don sent me; the essay is not included on the Abaton website); and [5] the images, removed from the original and disseminated over a network (email and web). A good part of what follow's is in Don's (the artist's) voice, as he describes his process and concerns, and there are three other individuals and/or institutions with something to say: the gallery promoting the show, the writer supporting the work, and a viewer with observations and questions. Being on the opposite coast of Don's show, I didn't see it, but I can still engage in it. This demonstrates how over distance this simple technology we're using (email) helps support a dialog about art; there's an aspect of the social and community that can help support, articulate, or distribute one's work, even when we know that the absolute best thing is to see the work itself in person. I think that even more important than uses of technology as a new medium for art, the use of technology like this for extending one's network and conversation is an important thing for artists to understand. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ [1] The announcement: R-Value "Labonte R-7.5", 2006, oil on styrofoam, 10 x 12.5 x 1.5 inches Press Release:
[2] I wrote to Don:
[3] Don replied:
"Fittipaldi R-10", 2006, oil on styrofoam, 14.5 X 14.25 X 2 inches ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ [4] Jim Long's essay for Don Voisine's catalog:
|
This work is different than the stuff on 
I watch a race or parts of one once in a while, Indy or NASCAR.. I was really into it as a kid. Especially stock cars 'cause they were more like regular cars. Back then Detroit was packing 450+ horsepower into little Mustangs and GTOs. Back when Richard Petty was young and tearing up the track. (I'm beginning to feel like I'm on a virtual rocking chair reminiscing about the old days.) (Left: "J-M Fangio R-15", 2006, spackle and oil on styrofoam, 12.6 x 8.5 x 3 inches) 
(Right: "R.Rudd R-5", 2006, Joint compound, spackle and oil paint on styrofoam, 7.5 X 12 X 1 inches) I don't have the equipment to spray this on but you can pour it on and brush or roll it out as well. They say you have 30 minutes of working time once you mix the A & B components together, but I was lucky to get 15 to 20 before it began to set. Working fast to spread out the material is what gives the edges the rounded unevenness and why it runs over the edges. (Jim Long, who writes for the Brooklyn Rail, wrote a short essay and associated the drips over the sides with staples seen on the side of a canvas, anchoring the ground all the way around. I'm paraphrasing.) Aside from the runs, I leave the sides uncoated to show the color of my substrate. I've used both the pink and blue versions. I wanted to use some of the yellow foam used in new construction, but that has a 'greasy' fiber coating on it and would have taken more time to figure out how to paint on it. 
As you noted, iconic and sign like. Which feeds into the car connection, and something I thought would fit into the garage locale. (Years back I'd done a painting that reminded me of the GM logo and I titled the painting "Chevy".) (But in working on this show I ditched a painting with a sort of V format, too much Valvoline.)
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 16, 2006
Painting: poignancy and ethics
From: Thinking Through Art : Reflections on Art as Research (Innovations in Art and Design). Edited by Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge. London ; New York : Routledge, 2006. 1 edition (November 10, 2005) 0415364779
POSTED WITHOUT PERMISSION
Chapter 9
Painting: poignancy and ethics
Jim Mooney
The condition of painting: how is painting doing?
Painting is a carcass right now - it has been picked clean of all its meat... painting has always been about death.
Lari Pittman1
This text seeks to explore questions which gather around the contemporary condition of painting and impact upon its future relevance as a vital and revitalised practice. The first of these questions, "How is painting doing?" is deliberately posed in the convention we might use to enquire after an ailing friend or acquaintance. Thoughts on the state of painting"s health inevitably arise in response to the seemingly perennial annunciation of its death or, at the very least, its terminal decline. It would indeed seem that when we begin to reflect upon painting thoughts of death, mortality, and finitude rarely lag far behind. Painting does certainly appear to enjoy a particularly entangled, intimate and longstanding relation to death. However, this relation might not be as morbid or settled as it first appears; instead it is a relation in endless ferment, still highly relevant, fascinating and capable of powerful illumination. It is this more profound relation to death which, paradoxically, lends painting its continued life force and defiant resistance to the writers of its many obituaries. The kind of question which seeks a response in the second section of this chapter would approximate something like, "What is painting doing?", "What can painting do?" or even "What is left for painting to do?"; but most keenly, the steering question which emerges is "What is our relation to painting?", especially indeed if, as Lari Pittman asserts, it has been picked clean of all its meat!
Death, of course, is not an event that we can ever know. In any case, it would be folly to think of death as a singular event. The only deaths we can experience are those deaths which unfold in life, which block living in life. We know our lives to be shaped by bereavements of all sorts, indeed, we metabolise bereavements slowly and they come to form part of who we are and who we will become. Culturally, however, it is the painter who has had to survive more than most. The painter has had to devise ways of facing the bereavement which follows on from the apparently interminable pronouncements of the death of the very practice which lends to, her or him the name painter. Some cultural commentators would have us believe that painting, if it is to have a continued cultural role, needs to open itself to various forms of contamination by other, purportedly more vital, practices in order to renew and extend its own vitality, in a somewhat forlorn bid to secure a foothold in the future. The demand is that painting move from some notional and moribund purity to a condition of fashionable hybridity, where painting is dilated and brings other modes of practice under the purview of its discourse. I have considerable sympathy for this ambition to reshape the territory of painting and there is no doubt something to be said for its advocacy, but I do question the ease with which this proposition is advanced as a sort of cure-all rescue remedy. I would propose that the more pressing exigency and arguably, the more challenging, would be to revitalise our understanding of painting. As we well know, painting has triumphantly survived these various death knells and currently enjoys the status of renewed cultural currency.
But how?
I"d like to propose that painting"s survival is secured by a certain failure which is the failure to mourn. This failure to mourn arises from the painter"s inability to detach his or her libido from the dead body of painting. Consequently, a pathological condition takes hold which prohibits the decathexis necessary to abandon this love object and wholly return to the world of the living. This condition is known to us as melancholia, a condition whereby we enter into an exhausting, yet never exhausted, dialogue with the dead. It is of course Freud who famously establishes a correlation between Mourning and Melancholia in his 1917 essay of the same name. In this essay he reveals to us a terrible yet necessary truth, that it is a matter of general observation that people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.2
It wouldn"t be a difficult undertaking to cite the array of contemporary art practices which beckon the painter, yet, obstinately, painters provide testimony to their possession by a body which is both the object and site of a failed or partial mourning. The temptation to be seduced by these other, supposedly, more vital practices, has proved to be too great for many, myself included, but not so for the painters who press ahead in their pursuits. They remain true to their first identificatory love and appear determined to kiss painting back to life. This wilful inability to let go, to relinquish possession, represents a significant victory for painting in the fraught and interminable struggle between the ego and the lost object. There is a considerable degree of ambivalence inherent in this relation and this ambivalence might be characterised as a kind of essential strife in which the painter oscillates between hate and love, between a murderous desire to "loosen the fixation of the libido to the object"," and the contrary desire to nourish this affective fixation. This latter desire is expressed through the work of the theoretically engaged painter as an act of obsessive, repeated reflection, on the condition of the practice. This work of repeated reflection unfolds in the tenebrous space of liminality which the painter has come to inhabit with the love object. Contemporary painters, addressing their own specific concerns and motivations, knowingly or unknowingly, enter into an extended dialogue with the condemned body of painting, which inevitably invokes its long, distinguished and degraded history. Successful mourning would allow these painters to bring the dialogue to a close, to walk away, unburdened and untroubled, the body laid to rest. Instead, they are trapped by their failed work of mourning, which, in turn, initiates an interminable dialogue in which matters of praxis become endlessly complicated and importantly, the most challenging of contemporary painters spur us on to revitalise the ways in which we think and come to understand the function of painting.
Admittedly, to speak of painting in the generic sense is a fraught business given the fractal intricacies which have come to characterise the contemporary operations of painters. Yet, there are nevertheless general remarks which can be made with regard to the function of painting to which a degree of cultural worth still attaches. It is perhaps a commonplace to assert that painting, in common with other aesthetic productions, simultaneously marks and is marked by loss. Nevertheless, it is such a fundamental condition that it is worth reiterating that the loss of the originary love object provides the painter with a necessary and vital generative impetus. Moreover, the kind of painting which furnishes us with images, functions, in part, commemoratively, and although not strictly speaking indexical, nevertheless points an index finger, as it were, to the object which the painted image now comes to substitute and resemble.
Crucially, painting is both of this world and yet simultaneously posits a world in itself, that is, a world decisively separated but nevertheless extricated from this world. In this sense it enacts a double occupancy, being both an object in this world and presenting to us a world in itself where things are identified, selected and extracted from this world and are duly accorded an exotic positioning; exotic, in the etymological sense of outside, delzors, apart from. One of the crucial functions of art and imagistic painting in particular (although photography would also be an exemplar) is this ability to separate out from this, our world, something of that world and allow the chosen image/object to stand apart in order that it can be appreciated anew and seen as if for the first time. The effect of this is to produce a sensation of things-in-themselves. In this way, objects familiar to us ring strange and are framed through the processes, treatments and attentions of painting whereby their appearance shifts, is doubled, and assumes the character of alterity.4 But, how is this exotic reality, this fragment extracted from our world, restored to us, made accessible once more? Clearly it is through the aesthetic, and 1 would like to add, the ethical encounter with art that our experience and understanding of these objects is revitalised and renewed. According to Levinas, it is through sympathy and I would wish to introduce poignancy as a vital medium for this apprehension and appreciation.
There is a world of Delacroix and a world of Victor Hugo. Artistic reality is a mind"s mean of expression. Through sympathy for this soul of things or of the artist the exoticism of the work is integrated into our world. That will be so inasmuch as the alterity of the other remains as alter ego, accessible through sympathy.5 This notion of a double occupancy, this transformation of familiar object into strange and forbidding image, brings to mind Maurice Blanchot"s radical likening of the status of the image to that of the cadaver which, we are instructed, is uncannily both here and nowhere. It is Blanchot who teaches us that this privileged non-site is shared by both the cadaverous presence (the presence of the unknown) and the image. He writes: "The image does not, at first glance, resemble the corpse but the cadaver"s strangeness is perhaps also that of the image".6 The appearance of the image, in common with that of the cadaver, depends on an immensely fragile and disturbing doubling and, most poignantly, is what is left behind when the object it resembles is gone. The work of the painter engages in the delicate process of creating apparitions which can occasionally glow and cast illumination upon this otherwise abandoned ground of dereliction.
In a particular sense, the image assumes a mediating role between the subject (viewer) and the object to which it refers. Viewed in this way, the painted substrate, the surface, facilitates and proposes this mediation. I prefer, however, to consider the carefully factured surface in terms of a differentially inclined spatial and temporal movement from inwardness to exteriority. Indeed, this very movement is the experience which I most value when I stand before a painting and the experience I most seek without ever knowing precisely what it is I seek. It is the movement which guarantees the renewal and continued cultural currency of painting. My face turns, looks before me, in a forward direction, to an exteriority, to the surface of things beyond in the transcendent spaces of the world.
I am minded to mention here Lacan"s proposition cited in the Four Fundamental Concepts that "in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometrical plane",7 and, if there is any merit to be found in this statement, we might fairly extend the proposition to include the painter of the picture, asserting that the screen (the geometrical plane of the canvas) now be seen as the locus of mediation between subjects, becoming a tenuous, fragile and luminous site of intersubjective exchange. We are dealing here with surfaces which face us with radically different tensions and functions which often operate simultaneously. Experience is transformed, and through our encounter with art, the transformed is returned to the realm of experience, extending our understanding of ourselves in the process. We respond to what Alphonso Lingis calls ‘imperative surfaces’.8 A surface might be wilfully hard, smooth and unyielding, equally it may be softly toothsome and absorbent, it might present a barrier to be overcome or negotiated or alternatively, it could offer an entirely welcoming and permeable skin. It could equally well be all that there is: pure surface. The surface might be virginal as in a tabula rasa or again, it may carry the heavy burden of saturated inscription. It can stand as the only glimpse we can apprehend of what lies behind or it can act as an aperture or passageway through to what has previously been entirely occluded. I am prompted to consider the painted surface as akin to the face of another and can be perceived as the exposed surface of a depth structure. The surface may well be all of these things, tessellated into a tightly woven mosaic of varying tensions and densities. However, let us be reminded that, in every case the surface, the (sur)face, is that which is most exposed and let us consider, in this light, Heidegger"s formulation of truth as "uncovering and uncoveredness, shedding light and light shed.9 This shedding of light on the uncovered, the exposure of the exposed face, produces a vulnerability which appeals (the call of the vulnerable), bringing nakedness to the surface. Standing before a painting, when conditions permit, we respond to the naked appeal of this surface and are beckoned, called upon to enter into a relation which is not nearly as forbidding, but is, nevertheless, akin to that which Levinas calls the "Face-to-Face". According to Levinas, the face is the invisible that summons from the distance of alterity. Lingis describes instances of the Face-to-Face encounter as follows: The face and surfaces of others afflict me, cleave to me, sear me. They solicit me, press their needs on me; they direct me, order me.
The face of a stranger in the crowd turned to me is an imposition. The face of a Somalian looking at me from a newspaper intrudes into my zone of implantation; I am relieved that the opaqueness of the paper screens me from him. In the corridors of my projects, my goals, and my reasons, the tormented laughter of the visionary and of the one lost in orgasmic abysses arrests my advance.10
The Face-to-Face relation carries the promise and demand of the possibility of radically reducing the distance which separates the Same from the Other. A proximity born in response to a beckoning distance, establishes itself, and takes up a precariously identified, quivering, position. Levinas writes:
The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.11
This call to respond solicits a movement which is both an inclination (a leaning toward) and a shift in inclination, that is, a shift in taste, a shift in disposition. We might pose here the question, at what point in this inclination does one slip into the other? Does this slippage entail a risk? Does the risk carry a loss or a gain? The loss would be a drop in ego strength, this could persuasively be argued as a gain of a kind, or a more unalloyed gain might be a gain in understanding; a sympathetic move from one to the other, from me to you or you to me, which entails no loss on either side, but nevertheless restores an equilibrium. Moreover; we need to consider the nature and function of this distance, this gap, between one and the other. Can this gap be erased or reduced, should we seek to abolish this distance, or is it an essential gap which provides for intersubjective interplay? Should we strive to overcome this distance which separates, seek the consolations of reconciliation? What is it that occurs at this juncture, in this hiatus? What is produced in this space, this distance, this lacuna? If we are to incline toward, change our position, in response to the poignant demand which weighs so heavily upon us, were we to shift our leaning from one foot to the other in sympathetic gesture, at what point do we recognise the need to rectify, adjust, draw back, reassemble? Clearly the Face-to-Face encounter carries a threat to our settled constitution, our daily routines and equilibriums. It carries in its train a disturbance which disorders. This can be treacherous. But it might also be instructive and illuminating. The appeal of the other has the power to shatter our. stabilities, shake up our quotidian habits, wrest us from our utilitarian regimes and oblige us to rethink and realign our sympathies. Lingis, understandably, seeks protection from this disturbance in the newspaper which separates him from the Somalian face which otherwise might solicit, cleave, sear and demand. The newspaper screens and blocks. Yet the photographed face nevertheless intrudes. Lingis might well drop his gaze, but he is already marked, contaminated, touché by the photographic punctum and stained by the effects of the poignant. The sting of the poignant lingers, settles in our depths and surfaces in unanticipated forms. The poignant becomes part of our "very constitution. Through its inescapable effects, we are obligated. Clearly, for Lingis, this distance, interval or gap, is a clearing which provides the necessary space for things to stand out, be seen, be set apart, and most importantly, establishes and maintains the possibility of discourse, communication; conversation: "This distance of otherness opens up the interval of discourse. Across this distance, we speak".12
Poignancy and ethics: or "What is our relation to painting?"
Following on from the preceding section which posed the question "How is painting doing?", in the manner we might enquire after a friend, this section is subtitled "What is our relation to painting?" I will open with a quotation from Camera Lucida, the germinal meditation on the photograph by Roland Barthes
A photograph"s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)13
Poignancy moves us, redirects us, and the movement it gives rise to, leans us toward the other and inclines us toward the condition of implication where the same and the other become entwined, enfolded, enlaced. It is the sting of poignancy which enables such a shift; we lurch, move outside ourselves, take a step beyond, and are briefly enveloped in the rapture of the ecstatic. This can never be expected or guaranteed, it may be sought out or hoped for, but almost always happens by accident and mostly when we are least prepared. When it does occur, it is experienced as an irrecoverable instant, a moment when our subjectivity is stretched beyond the confines of the familiar, and reaches out, gravitating toward the object of its longing. It is perhaps worth underscoring here the trace of the Greek ekstasis - stretching, through ekstasis - to make to stand, which remains resonant in the ecstatic. Moreover, and more importantly, according to Levinas, it is: "Through ecstasy [that] man takes up existence. Ecstasy is then found to be the very event of existence."14
Language can inhabit thought in ways which blind us to its treacherous deceit, concealing its other face in our usual patterns and habits of speech and I suspect we have become all too habituated to deploying the term poignancy in sentimental response to the pathetic scene and tend to overlook the subtle violence of which it also speaks. I would urge that we remember the semantic determinants of poignancy, which pertain to weapons, and signify something as being painfully sharp and piercing. With this in mind, if, for example, we take a foil, the type of sword used in competition which inflicts a sting as opposed to a mortal wound, and consider the disturbance it provokes, we inch ever closer to the establishment of an approximation between poignancy and Roland Barthes" articulation of the punctum. Most daringly, we might propose that we arrive at the insinuating intricacies of an ethics of the punctum. The punctum as ethical event? Might we audaciously nudge this idea along and formulate the proposition that it is poignancy which introduces the punctum (by now almost worn-out, tired and degraded, through discussions in relation to the photograph), to painting, where it becomes lodged in the very depths of its surface? It is due to a mobilising sympathy, aroused by poignancy, that the work becomes folded back, returned to us, incorporated once more into our world. An ethical event of this kind produces an "initial asymmetrical intersubjectivity", the weight of our concern lies with our own selfish interests and recognition of the subjectivity of the other is impoverished, unevenly tilted; that is, until the moment poignancy produces its sling, in an instant, and a sympathetic movement is initiated which inclines us in another direction, toward "the leaving of an inwardness for an exteriority".15 This event, in the order of events, is perhaps small, almost imperceptible, surreptitious even, and threatens to fade into the obscure if it were not also talked of as the very founding event of existence. This inclination, this departure from an inwardness to an exteriority, can be said to typify the operations of the painter as much as it could be said to describe the viewer"s relation as respondent to the appellant, to the work of the painter. Consequently, we may ask if it be licit to consider that viewer and painter do no more than collude in order to create the conditions under which the work does the work"s work? This double investment, this two-sided operation, speaks of a libidinous economy whereby the planar surface of the work becomes no more and no less than the site of a concentrated intersubjective exchange. This privileged site initiates a flow of grace and we might well deduce that the particular gift of the work is a gift which conveys the grace of poignancy and the poignancy of grace. I have in mind here the shed, shared, light of grace which flows from the ecstatic.
The work solicits our sympathy, our attention, and should we fall under the sway of its mute epiphany, and hear the muffled call to respond, a blossoming occurs, whereby an improbable organ of affectivity unfurls. Which, in turn, by some small miracle, reflects, as in a mirror, the very organ of affectivity which gave rise to the work in the first instance. In this way, the semblance of an intersubjective symmetry or equilibrium makes its appearance. Perhaps to speak of an organ of affectivity misleads, or leastways leads us in another direction, and I am persuaded to introduce a certain rigour which would dislodge this fancy and guide us to alight upon the notion of another improbable organ: the organ of the libido.
All painting demands to be apprehended in terms of its own seductive allure, its own particular capacity to present itself to us as a significant thing, and this is entirely appropriate. We are therefore pressed to attend to the specifics of the painted surface, the particular way in which matter is pleated and most especially, to the interlacing of matter, libido and thought.
Jaques Lacan designates a name for this organ which is not an organ in the normal sense, inasmuch as it does not require the usual nourishments and, by dint of this fact, is considered immortal. He calls it the lamella.16 The lamella is characterised by an extreme flatness. It moves around a lot, flying in every direction. It has the capacity to adhere and to insinuate. It can overwhelm. It can smother. It can, of course, adhere to the surface of a painting, and then again, it can fly off. It might even strike us in the face! It sticks to painting in the way painters stick to painting. It is the very glue, the sticky substance of jouissance which fixes the painter on painting. It is clear we don"t have much choice in the matter. We are bonded, by something like the bonds of love, to a practice which refuses to relinquish its hold. The painter is held in thrall by this interminable libidinal fixation. We, as viewers, as respondents, are in turn, enthralled by these libidinally charged surfaces which solicit and soak up some of our own libidinal pulsions. Poignancy, then, gives rise to the ethical and the libidinal in a bid to stir, to implicate our capacity to care; to respond to the call of the other, to his or her beguiling alterity. This is a movement toward the Good. We become implicated through an overcoming of the indifference which stifles response. This implication in the alterity of the other, moves us toward a questioning of our own subject positions and instigates a shift in our own capacity for recognition and it might be helpful here to recount that, according to Levinas, "alterity is the region where the other, susceptible and vulnerable, abides in mortality.’17
The dynamic oscillation between proximity and distance, provoked by this encounter, introduces subtle erotic modalities which place us, as subjects, under pressure. This pressure arises from the disturbance carried in the train of the demand to effect a repositioning, enact a shift in inclination, as we ready ourselves to face the work"s face. It might appear extreme to talk of the work"s face in this context and appear to stretch the notion to an untenable limit. I propose that not in all cases could it be said that the work of art is in possession of a face, however we recognise those that do by the force of the demand they carry. In support of this assertion that the work exhibits the conditions which might enable it to be in possession of a face.
This work of facing is more challenging than we might at first imagine. The first challenge is to sovereignty, to the very notion of a sovereign subject. And if this challenge is effective, it opens us to a threatening stateless state of being, to a place where we are suddenly assailable, responsive, vulnerable and questioning. The comfort of an illusory stasis of Being cedes to the more troubling flux of new becomings. When most effective and affective, paintings represent the presences of those absences which have the power to marshal all of our other absences and bring them, sometimes cruelly, poignantly, before our very presence. We are in this way, called to account; called to account for our presence in the fullness of this alterity, this presence/absence of the other.
I would like to turn my attention to that most haptic and resonant of human expressions: the caress. In particular, I want to touch upon art"s caress.18 The caress of art can convey, in an inimical way, the weight of the poignant as surface traverses surface, skin encounters skin, attachments formed. One skin inheres upon the other seeking in this caress, the powerful admixture of intelligibility in sensibility.19 Looking is akin to the caress. It unfolds in the register of the virtual haptic. One surface travels over another, searching, desiring, seeking and promising infinite tendernesses, revelation, and on occasion, the welcome bathos of consolation. The caress must traverse one skin in order to reach another in a play of purposeful purposelessness. We respond: response generates response. A peristaltic wave is initiated and implicates us through a process of enfolding invagination, of seeking and desire. We shudder. We falter. We blush, our temperature inflamed. Response activates response. We might respond or fail to respond: turning our head, indifferent in the face of such solicitation. If the appeal of this solicitation succeeds in garnering our sympathies, we can no longer stifle response; we are moved, we lean toward, shift our ground. As our eye roves across the painting"s surface, we indulge our virtual haptic desires; mute, but alert with all manner of anticipation and longing. We long because we seek even though what we seek resolutely resists disclosure. Through this longing, we seek to quell our troubling fixations and our yearnings. We continue to long in the full knowledge that what we most yearn forever eludes our grasp and, necessarily, what eludes us, in turn, nourishes our yearnings:
The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain way it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it. 20
Through this metaphoric/metonymic caress (the virtual haptic), I open myself up to the pleasures and vicissitudes of looking, as one opens oneself to the pain of loss and yearning; through vulnerability and risk. To risk one"s vulnerability is to risk one"s Self. It is most decidedly a question of jouissance. This condition of jouissance carries the threat of disorder, of undoing, unmaking; resulting in the shattering of the constitution of the subject. The act of opening up can take the form of a wound (blessure) or it may be a blossoming in the sense of Blanchot"s epanouissement, both, however, result in the burgeoning of the emergent subject. It is an unfurling, an exposure enacted through gradual turning, unfolding, explication: it is nakedness. To turn the hidden face outwards, to turn to face the world, to face the other: Face-to-Face. Importantly, keenly, it is relational:
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here, the duration of the transmission is insignificant.... A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.21
Shared skins
In the preceding quote, Barthes is, of course, referring to his apprehension of a photograph. Surely, I would propose, much the same can be said for painting. The light which emanates from the painting becomes our shed, shared light. It is a light which reflects from the surface of the painting in a way determined by the painter in the course of the painting"s production. This light becomes the light which beckons, arrests us before the work, fixates, envelops and draws us into the space of the painting. This is a space of cultural encounter, of dialogue and significance, but a priori and a posteriori, before and after all else, it is a space of sensation. A sensate space, a space of intelligibility. This encounter of surfaces (of the painting and of the skin) produces palpable physiological changes which register as much on the surface of the skin as they do on the eye of the beholder. As such, this shared light which resonates is, in every extent, equal to that of the photograph and deserves also to be nominated a carnal medium. I would not be the first to attempt to establish an analogy between the surface of a painting and the surface of the body. Indeed much has been written on the likening of the skin of the body to the skin of painting. The metaphors are clear and persuasive. At first glance, on the surface, as it were, the skin thresholds; dividing inside from outside, determining what may be shown, separating visible and invisible. Skins are uncannily versatile, can be adopted and adapted. Clothes, for example, act as our surrogate, fake, skins. They become carriers of identity and through endless permutation, project, lure, camouflage and disguise. The visible is but the skin of invisibility. Skins are multilayered, and can be shed little by little, imperceptibly, or in one go, depositing a vacated sheath behind. The sentient skin lies beneath the dead, dry, layer of epidermis. A light dusting of death. Death"s pall. An infra-thin layer, where the exterior, most exterior, surface of the body meets the exterior, most exterior surface of the world, an infra-thin layer of death is encountered, chaffed and grazed by the abrasive discomfiture of the world. It necessarily follows, that what first greets us when we gaze upon the body is a dehiscent, invisibly thin cloak of death. We mostly look beyond this to a region which satisfies our search for that which is vivifying and affirmative. We seek what is moist and glistens what is smooth and appealing: hair, skin, nails. The partial objects which constantly fall from the body, shed bodily detritus. This sensate and sensible surface, is the most extensive organ of the human body and the outermost layer is composed of dry, dead scales that are surreptitiously chaffed, rubbed away and fall to the ground as we make our passage through the world. (Picasso reputedly gathered his nail and hair clippings from the barber and stored them in paper bags throughout his life.) Usually forgotten cast-offs, sometimes discarded in the guise of works of art. The painter requires this abrasive resistance from the world in order that he or she can shed their skins in the form of the works they produce. Some skins are easily shed, others put up greater resistance. After each shedding we set to work on the new.
There are skins that cover and protect and skins that expose and endanger and skins that perform both operations simultaneously. Skins that suffocate and suppress, skins that breathe and pulsate with desire. Skins that transpire and stain. Skins that retain, hold within and swell. Skins that leak. Skin one layer thin and skin that is composed of countless layers, a palimpsest, a mute history. Skins are the surface of a depth structure. There are moments in time when the surface of the body and the surface of the work elide, become one and what is tattooed on the surface of the work is simultaneously being inscribed on the surface of the body. In this way a work of art emerges and we too are changed; in a very important sense, art becomes us.
Notes
1 Pittman, Lari, Gallery Talk at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 4 December 1993.
2 Freud, Sigmund (1991) "Mourning and Melancholia", in Penguin Freud Levinas, Volume I1, On Metapsychology The Theory of Psychoanalysis. London: Penguin, p. 253.
3 Ibid. p. 267.
4 Levinas, Emmanuel (1995) Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston, MA and London: Kluwer Academic, p. 53. 5 Ibid. p. 55.
6 Blanchot, Maurice (1982) The Two Versions of" the Imaginary: The Space of Literature. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, p. 256.
7 Lacan, Jacques (1977) What is a Picture? in The Four Fundamental Concepts of PscchoAnalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, p. 108.
8 Lingis, Alphonso (1994) Imperative Surfaces, Foreign Bodies. New York and London: Routledge.
9 Inwood, Michael (1997) Heidegger. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 48. 10 Lingis (1994), p. 217.
11 Levinas, Emmanuel (1989) Ethics as First Philosophy, in Sean Hand (ed.) The Levinas Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 83.
12 Lingis, Alphonso (1996) "Sensation: Intelligibility", in Sensibility, Face-to-Face. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, p. 67.
13 Barthes, Roland (1984) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Fontana, p. 27. 14 Levinas (1995), pp. 81-2. I S Ibid. p. 95.
16 For an interesting discussion of the lamella in relation to the work of Francis Bacon, see Adams, Parveen (1996) "The Violence of Paint", in The Emptiness of the Image: Psycho-analysis and Sexual Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 118-21. 17 Lingis (1994), p. 223.
18 See Fisher, Jean (1997) "Art"s Caress", in Ine Gevers and Jeanne van Heeswijk (eds) Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij SUN, pp. 146-67."
19 Lingis, "intelligibility in Sensibility", in Lingis (1996).
20 Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Phenomenology of Eros, Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, pp. 256-7.
21 Barthes (1984), pp. 80-1.
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 15, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 14, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 13, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
October 12, 2006
Mauai Sketchbook
Mauai Sketchbook (Honokawai), October 8-10, 2006, ink on paper, Size A5 (5.83 x 8.27 inches)
Suitcase
Detail: Suitcase Tokyo installation; more pictures by Brent Hallard
October 11, 2006
October 10, 2006
October 09, 2006
October 08, 2006
October 07, 2006
October 06, 2006
October 05, 2006
October 04, 2006
October 03, 2006
October 02, 2006
October 01, 2006
Ornette I-IV
Ornette IV, 2006, oil and Rust-oleum aluminum on clear acrylic on linen with aluminum tacks, 12 x 10 inches
Ornette I-IV, 2006, oil and Rust-oleum aluminum on clear acrylic on linen with aluminum tacks, 12 x 10 inches each
"Ornette" refers to Ornette Coleman, who recently said, “Right now, I’m trying to play the instrument, and I’m trying to write, without any restrictions of chord, keys, time, melody and harmony, but to resolve the idea eternally, where every person receives the same quality from it, without relating it to some person.”