{"id":619,"date":"2011-10-16T17:14:42","date_gmt":"2011-10-16T17:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=619"},"modified":"2011-10-17T13:05:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-17T13:05:25","slug":"its-about-the-paint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=619","title":{"rendered":"It’s about the paint"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Blue Clamp Jim Dine<\/p><\/div>\n

In the most recent Art in America<\/em>, the editors called out a quote from Ed Ruscha<\/a> about painting which has been nagging at me: \u201cI\u2019m still puzzled about my own work when it comes to painting\u2014whether it\u2019s really that necessary to believe in this great ideal of the painter\u2019s painter and the idea of spreading paint on a canvas. I question all of that.\u201d Ruscha\u2019s work as a pure painter can be tremendously impressive, the simplicity and scale of his imagery, so stripped of emotion and seemingly devoid of context\u2014his imagery is monumental, impersonal, and mysterious in a cerebral but fascinating way. One might almost say Cartesian in the way each painting seems absolutely sure of one thing: its own existence. When he superimposes text\u2014his little Zen koans that aren\u2019t meant to enlighten\u2014the mysteries thin out toward a supercool ambiguity, like lines out of John Ashbery, so resonant when you read them until they self-destruct when you try to investigate a little further. Nothing wrong with that, but puzzlement gets old when awe doesn\u2019t make you forget about trying to understand what you\u2019re seeing. And Ruscha\u2019s word paintings are too intentionally sardonic to evoke awe. They have Pop\u2019s detached, self-cancelling reserve, suggesting a skeptical perspective on popular culture without ever letting you in on the joke. Ruscha\u2019s precision, the way he makes you forget you\u2019re looking at paint is part of what gives his huge paintings, the wordless ones, so much power, so it\u2019s understandable he might decide to dispense with paint altogether.<\/p>\n

The fascination of painting, first and foremost, is the sheer physicality of paint. Many of the greatest paintings revel in their ability to rub your nose in the nature of the medium on a given surface, the way it slides, clumps, and flows, thick as icing on a cake or thin as wax on a car\u2014all of this while the paint makes you imagine something else, even if it\u2019s as indistinct as a Rothko horizon line. This double-vision\u2014the way a painting can make you see paint qua<\/em> paint, while, at the same time, evoking an illusion of something that isn\u2019t really there\u2014that\u2019s the magic. When Ruscha makes the paint irrelevant, when he makes you see only what he means for you to see and forget what you\u2019re actually looking at, then he might as well dispense with paint. And that\u2019s a perfectly acceptable choice. Spreading paint is simply a choice, but a choice that points toward a sort of surrender you don\u2019t find in Ruscha\u2019s work\u2014a surrender to the medium where it\u2019s allowed to contribute in ways that can\u2019t be entirely controlled or anticipated. De Kooning made this surrender the central impetus of his work, yet go back centuries and you\u2019ll see this duplicity, this fascination with the luxuriance of paint itself, as well as for the way it can let you see beyond it. It\u2019s there, again and again, at the center of an artist\u2019s mission, this duplicity. Bacon says somewhere, to comment on his indebtedness to Velasquez, that the texture of paint on a canvas\u2014simply the way it\u2019s handled\u2014can have a direct, subconscious effect on the nervous system of someone who looks at the painting. That comment was his way of saluting the glories of brushwork in a typical Velasquez, and you can see how Bacon\u2019s own handling of paint derives from it. Think of the artists whose discipline was to \u201cpush paint around\u201d in his or her own unique way\u2014a phrase Peter Schjeldahl used to describe Soutine\u2019s technique. Braque, Van Gogh, Bacon, Freud, Sargent, Manet, Hals, Chardin, Vermeer, Matisse, Porter, Bonnard, de Kooning, Thiebaud, Sickert, Dine, El Greco, Saville, Kiefer, Innes\u2014I’ll stop, but the list keeps going. Select a painting from each of those artists and turn it upside down\u2014to nullify the image you\u2019re meant to see through the paint\u2014and just observe the surface, and it\u2019s obvious how each artist imparted a unique feel for anyone viewing the canvas, simply in the way each applied paint to the surface. The texture produces a certain kind of purely physical experience. They all learned how to get paint to do things on its own and to make the almost tactile sensation of looking at paint a part of the mission. The list of artists who don\u2019t do this\u2014those whose genius emerged primarily in watercolor like Blake and Klee and Burchfield\u2014might be just as long. But I think, to say the least, we\u2019ve moved beyond the point where we think rendering an image in paint is the ultimate ideal for art, since we just emerged from a long dark period where painting was left for dead. Even so, it\u2019s nice to hear somebody still talk about \u201cthe ideal of the painter\u2019s painter.\u201d If you want to be in total control of the process, of the final image, by all means, toss out the acrylic, the enamel, the oil, the brushes and knives and the rags. Yet the act of painting is as much about the body as it is about the mind. If you want a medium that has a life of its own, conveying the purely physical qualities of the object and the unexpected quirks imparted by the movements of fingers, hands, arms\u2014and maybe even the legs, in the case of Pollock\u2014then you can\u2019t do any better than work in oil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the most recent Art in America, the editors called out a quote from Ed Ruscha about painting which has been nagging at me: \u201cI\u2019m still puzzled about my own work when it comes to painting\u2014whether it\u2019s really that necessary to believe in this great ideal of the painter\u2019s painter and the idea of spreading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIt's about the paint - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=619\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It's about the paint - 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