Close(r)

“Hello,
I am new to art and the theory of art and reading your Theory Now blog is a big help. I'm also reading Tom Wolfe's ‘The Painted Word’ and Kirk Varnedoe's ‘Pictures of Nothing.’ Both of these books are interesting and illuminating. I recently watched a documentary about Chuck Close, which was fantastic. I have a question for you, regarding a comment Chuck Close made in the film. He said Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz ‘kicked the door open for the kind of intelligent figuration...’ What does he mean by ‘intelligent figuration?’ It sounds impressive and interesting, but what does it mean? ‘Intelligent figuration.’

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,
Curtis [D. Thomson]”

Hello Curtis,
Many thanks for your kind words and welcome to my blog. I want to respond to your query on “intelligent figuration” in this post. I have done this before and it might initiate further discussion on the topic with other readers.

I thought about your question related to Chuck Close and “intelligent figuration” and searched YouTube for the documentary. Although I could not find film or video, I did find the conversation Close had with Isca Greenfield-Sanders on January 17, 2006. I think it important to give the context in which the phrase was used before I speculate on its “meaning” or pursue any critical thoughts about it.

Greenfield-Sanders is also an artist and they were discussing the use of photographs as sources of “information” for their paintings. Greenfield-Sanders stated that photography “gets you to a point very quickly” and Close said:

“I don’t know why everyone doesn’t work from a photograph because it gives you a way to make shapes you have never made before, use colors you have never used before, make edges that you haven’t dreamed of. I remember Philip Pearlstein wrote in the New York Times years ago ‘I get my highs from using my eyes’ which was an indictment of people who worked from photographs. And in essence he was saying that if you worked from photographs that you weren’t looking. If you are working from life you are seeing and if you are working from photographs you are just mindlessly copying. I thought, so, if you are looking at a photograph you aren’t looking? What shuts down? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”(1)

Greenfield-Sanders replied that “paintings that got painted before I was painting allowed my work to short hand those changes in attitude without having to restate the givens.” And then Close said:

“For me, people who kicked open the door that I breezed right through were trying to make intelligent, modernist figuration instead of going back and breathing new life into nineteenth century notions of figuration. It was really important, absolutely critical. I think as a matter of fact that one could make the case that modernist painting is entirely what it is because of the invention of photography. If you think about photography in the 1940’s, it was black and white. Painting immediately became much more colorful. Early on, photography was static because of the long exposure times so everything in painting began to move and shift -- and we got futurism and two views from cubism. Photography was incredibly detailed so the impressionists broke up everything in view. In a way, photography drove painting each step of the way. It wasn’t until the 1950’s and 60’s that there became an antagonism between photography and painting -- although painters were the first people to embrace photography.”

When we understand that they were discussing photography and its use as a “tool” for painting it affects our understanding of Close’s comment on “intelligent, modernist figuration.” Clearly, he does not believe Pearlstein “kicked open the door” as Close views Pearlstein’s comment as “an indictment of people who worked from photographs.” Pearlstein prefers to use his own visual perception to paint, not photographs.

Close does not mention Alex Katz in the Greenfield-Sanders conversation; perhaps you are confusing it with another interview or documentary. Close does mention Warhol briefly as someone “making paintings with silk screens that were one gesture, one squeegee stroke.” It seems logical that Close considers Warhol to be innovative or his silk screens to be “intelligent” because they appear to deny traditional methodologies of painting. However, I do not view Warhol’s work as “intelligent” figurative painting; Warhol is really an expanded yet shallower version of Duchampian ideas.

Recently, I have been reading David Carrier’s excellent book, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism. In Carrier’s consideration of Krauss, he refers to her break from Clement Greenberg’s belief that modernist painting began with Manet. Krauss felt that “modernism began with Rodin” because his sculpture did not “present a visual narrative.”(2) Sculpture prior to Rodin represented the expressiveness of the figure through the physicality of the material and conveyed a sense of narrative. Krauss has pointed out that Rodin did not relate the exterior appearance of the figure to its anatomical “inner structure” and, thus, he “produced an art intensely hostile to rationalism.”(3)

This denial of narrative in relation to figurative representation by Rodin is theorized by Krauss as the advent of modernism. I believe her theory can be brought to bear on a discussion of Close and this idea of “intelligent figuration.” One of the reasons I think Close uses photography as a source material or “information” to paint from is the possibilities it offers him to achieve what he has referred to as an “abstract reading of space.” Ironic as this sounds, Close is able to make “abstract” paintings by working from photographs. His method is much discussed in other conversations which I found on-line and have to do with his ability to represent a realistic image through careful construction of seemingly abstract paint marks that, when viewed from afar, “read” as figurative:

“I wanted to deal in a non-relational way with the imagery. Like, we know the space of the head because we know heads […] I wanted to arrive at a potentially abstract reading of space, independent from the iconography due to the visual clues.”(4)

I believe this is why Close’s use of photography can be thought of as “intelligent figuration.” Close has “breezed right through” those doors opened up by Rodin by denying the inherent narrative within a photographic image. Close uses the raw information of the photograph to work within a gridding system to construct a non-narrative image. It is simply a process but it has “intelligence” because of the freedom now allowed in figurative painting. Paintings generated by photography do not have to be “representational” but can instead be “read” as information systems.

Regards,
MCB

Image: Lucas (1986 - 1987) and detail of eye; oil and pencil on canvas; Metropolitan Museum of Art; © Copyright by Chuck Close.
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1. This and the second quote are taken from “A Conversation, Chuck Close and Isca Greenfield-Sanders” on Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ web site.

2. Carrier, David. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism, Westport, 2002, 34.

3. Krauss, Rosalind. Passages in Modern Sculpture, New York, 1977, 9.

4. Inside New York’s Art World Chuck Close, 1978.

Remember the 5th

"Protesters calling for Parliamentary reform in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal are using Guy Fawkes day today to float an effigy up the Thames to the Houses of Parliament.

The campaigners are setting off from an East London wharf pulling a 10ft high duck house to dock at the Palace of Westminster while they claim MPs are busy plotting to overturn Sir Christopher Kelly’s recommendations on claiming for mortgages and employing relatives."

Source: East London Advertiser; 05 November 2009.

Critic Wags the Dog

In a rather superficial critique of conceptual art, Denis Dutton cites Damien Hirst in his recent New York Times op-ed piece and uses Hirst’s medicine cabinets to draw a distinction between the “technical skill” of representational art and the “lack of craftsmanship” in contemporary conceptual art. The implication being that conceptual art that demonstrates little more than “skill in playing inventively with ideas” has less aesthetic “value” than a traditional art of “painstakingly developed artistic technique.”(1)

Dutton bemoans the continued adulation of “conceptual artists” like Hirst and was dreading an Oct. 16th Christie’s sale of “Post-War and Contemporary Art” that featured Hirst’s medicine cabinet on the auctioneer’s block.

Glancing through the various lots that were sold last week-end at Christie’s yielded interesting bits of news: several Richard Prince “photos” (appropriated) did not sell; while Vanessa Beecroft is still getting $17,000 USD for her ancient “VB-35” soft-core prints. Meanwhile, it helps to be dead, as usual: Martin Kippenberger selling from $1.7 to $3.7 million USD; Jorg Immendorf at $99,000; Jack Goldstein at $80,000.

So we can say that some of the “conceptualists” at least have an exchange value if not an aesthetic one. The Hirst cabinet, by the way, subsequently sold for $187,627.

In his opinion piece, Dutton expresses distaste for the “tradition of conceptual art” that is “admire(d) not for skillful hands-on execution by the artist, but for the artist’s creative concept.” Yet rather than critique the truly “creative” ideas born of 1960s conceptualism, Dutton focuses on a couple of contemporary sham purveyors (Hirst and Jeff Koons) who bungled one of the better “ideas” in the Duchampian oeuvre – appropriation.(2)

Instead of discussing any of the resilient and potent theories and ideas inherent in conceptual art, Dutton seems content to go after the one methodology initiated by Duchamp that metamorphosed throughout the 20th Century to become photo-appropriation (see Prince and Sherrie Levine) or worse still, second-tier copyists (see almost all of the yBa's).

Appropriation is a tough theory; difficult to apprehend and hard to teach. The general public often reacts negatively to works that are “borrowed” because of a knee-jerk response to art that is obviously not “original.” It’s a fair point and instigates impassioned debates on authenticity, simulacra and the authorial imperative that was so ingrained in visual art before Duchamp.(3)

Clearly though, Dutton’s intent was to draw readers in with a superficial attack on a "tricky" idea of conceptualism so he could meander off on his real topic: to speculate on whether prehistoric hand-axes were possibly the first works of art since their blades indicate they were unused. I will not pursue the logic of Dutton’s assumption that disuse equates with preciousness and, thus, that those axes are artworks. What I will do is point out some other ideas that came out of conceptualism that he missed and that continue as strong work by the best postconceptual artists.

Conceptual art questioned the traditional role of the art object as the conveyer of meaning. By exploring the elusive “art object” and its contested importance as a precious, well-crafted thing, conceptual art (and postconceptualism) accomplished its subsequent “dematerialization.” Art “objects” began to be “made” from impermanent materials (string, dirt, inert gases). Artists documented ephemeral experiences occurring in specific places over specific durations of time (spatio-temporality). Information became “art” and the “form” an object took was the result of a process. Conceptualists also made work that was participatory and incorporated the actions of others and even the viewing public.

But these ideas are harder to critique so Dutton went after the easy mark, appropriation. He does not seem to fully comprehend appropriation as a “concept” either, because he mistakenly includes Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” in his attack – Kosuth photographs the objects himself at the site where the object and its dictionary definition will sit.

Undoubtedly, the kind of weak attack Dutton mounted in the New York Times surfaces periodically about contemporary art that is challenging, and certainly the most challenging art these days bears an allegiance to conceptualism. Those visual theories and ideas that were originally posited by some artists of the 1960’s approached significant new ways of dealing with visuality. It is my belief that there are still a few who are extending these ideas to continue its impact as postconceptualism.

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1. This and all subsequent quotes by Dutton are from “Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?”

2. The only reason I show Hirst’s shark and Koons’s vacuum to my theory students is to emphasize the debt they both owe Duchamp.

3. I have posted frequently on appropriation here and my students have written about it, too. However, my response to Dutton’s piece – indeed, to any attack on conceptual art – is to remind all and sundry that there are more ideas in conceptualism than shopping at the hardware store.

1 or 2 Images

"Most artists only have one or two good images in them. Maybe four. My images come from a process - they are created by the process. The images are unimportant - the process is.

Unfortunately, artists who become successful at it try to make it a career - this means that their images eventually degrade, or weaken. Like Stella. Or Kosuth. Or Bob Morris. Find some other way to survive - teach - play music - but after the best images come, it's time to quit."


Notebook entry on 12/25/08.

Curatorial Missteps

Poor judgment in curatorial practice abounds but occasionally an error in curatorial decision-making becomes so glaringly obvious that it must be pointed out so that other curators can avoid the same mistake. Such is the case with the Chicago Art Institute’s poor choice of situating Bruce Nauman’s “Clown Torture” video installation 20 feet from Robert Ryman’s “The Elliott Room (Charter Series)” and sharing Gallery 295B in the Modern Wing.

The Rymans are gorgeous “oils” in his characteristic fetish whites on anodized aluminum panels, some as large as eight feet. The installation itself is clearly about one’s perceptual encounter with the panels; experiencing the pristine and exacting beauty of minimal art. Presumably a viewer could spend some quality time with these panels as the Art Institute has thoughtfully provided a large bench squarely in the center of the Ryman room.

This is where I seated myself in a recent visit to the Art Institute, to commune a bit with the Rymans. However, it was immediately apparent that my visual interaction with the wide expanse of luscious whites would not be peaceful, for the audio cacophony of Nauman’s “Clown Torture” spills over into the Ryman space. And when I say “spill” I do not mean just a trickle of sound.

“Clown Torture” is a disturbing work by any estimation, consisting of six channels running Nauman’s video:
The monitors play four narrative sequences in perpetual loops, each chronicling an absurd misadventure of a clown, who is played to brilliant effect by the actor Walter Stevens. According to the artist, distinctions may be made among the clown protagonists; one is the “Emmett Kelly dumb clown; one is the old French Baroque clown; one is a sort of traditional polka-dot, red-haired, oversized show clown; and one is a jester.” In “No, No, No, No (Walter),” the clown incessantly screams “No!” while jumping, kicking, or lying down; in “Clown with Goldfish,” he struggles to balance a fish bowl on the ceiling with the handle of a broom; in “Clown with Water Bucket,” he repeatedly opens a door that is booby-trapped with a bucket of water, which falls on his head; and finally, in “Pete and Repeat,” he succumbs to the terror of a seemingly inescapable nursery rhyme: “Pete and Repeat are sitting on a fence. Pete falls off. Who’s left? Repeat.”

I can appreciate the absurdity, the unhinged madness of Nauman’s work. Certainly it is as much a perceptual experience, albeit a more disturbing one, as the Ryman room just around the corner. But why would the curators place these works in such close proximity to one another? Surely they had a trial run with the Nauman video to check and establish sound levels and video quality. Wouldn’t someone, even an intern, have noted then that the sound from the Nauman installation, which the museum describes as “an assault on viewers’ aural and visual perception,” invades and disrupts the ostensibly contemplative experience of the Ryman paintings in the next room?

Surely it was not the intention of the Art Institute for my contemplation of the Rymans to have the unintentional “soundtrack” of Walter Stevens screaming at the top of his lungs, “No, no, no!”

But then again, stranger things have occurred in museums of late. Perhaps the curators were after some kind of ironic intervention to mock the idea of “contemplation.” If they wanted to pair the subdued minimalist beauty of the Rymans with distracting noise they should have rented storefront space down on Wabash under “The El.” There the viewer’s appreciation of those Ryman “whites” would have been as effectively destroyed by the randomly thundering rattle of the train overhead.