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 fr