Art in the Making

Artists and their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing

Glenn Adamson, Julia Bryan-Wilson

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780500773420
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Todays artists have an unprecedented level of choice with regard to materials and methods available to them, yet the processes involved in making artworks are rarely addressed in books or exhibitions on art. Here, Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson argue that the materials and methods used to make artworks hold the key to artists motivations, their attitudes to authorship, uniqueness and the value of objects, the economic and social contexts from which they emerge, and their approach to the perceived opposition between materiality and conceptualism in art.

The books introduction sets out a history of trends in artistic production and the possible catalysts for the proliferation of production strategies since the mid-twentieth century, followed by nine chapters that explore different methods and media. Detailed examples are interwoven with the discussion, including visuals that reveal the intricacies of each technique or material and its overall effect when presented as an artwork. Artists featured include Ai Weiwei, Ron Arad, Chris Burden, Katharina Fritsch, Isa Genzken, Jeff Koons, Los Carpinteros, Haroon Mirza, Takashi Murakami, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo and Santiago Sierra.

Chapter 1

In 1994, a group of prominent art historians fell into an argument about the definition of painting. The dispute concerned the conceptual artist Robert Barry. Best known for works that were invisible and undetectable, such as a release of colorless, odorless gases into the desert atmosphere of the US West – his Inert Gas series (1969) – or radiation emitted in a gallery, Barry was called a “painter” by Thierry de Duve. “That’s a textbook example of a painter dematerializing painting but always remaining a painter in the end,” de Duve said.¹ Others in the conversation, which was published in the journal October, variously agreed – or strenuously disagreed – with this assertion.

Robert Barry, Inert Gas series, 1969. Catalog page, photographs and color slide, 19

× 19

in. (50 × 50 cm)

Their lack of consensus points to the ever-shifting borders around painting, as it has become an increasingly slippery term in recent decades. Our relatively straightforward assumption that to paint is to apply pigment to a surface has been somewhat unmoored. At the same time, the status long afforded to painting as the most emblematic of art-making practices has become eroded, and even erased. What, we might ask, is the “work” of painting today? Does the manipulation of pigment on a flat surface still have a privileged role to play in contemporary art? Or has it become just another process, no more (or less) special than any other?

Further questions arise when we begin to consider the boundaries of painting as a physical practice. What about the support: is a painting a painting because it was made with paint on canvas? (Museum curators in departments known as “works on paper,” who look after drawings, prints, watercolors, and sometimes photographs, might see the logic in this distinction.) What about images made of blood, mud, jam, or string? Is a painting any optical, physical object that brings together a more-or-less flat structure, surface, and support? Or, following de Duve, can something like an imperceptible, amorphous gas also be included in the medium’s fold? These questions are not merely semantic. They cut right to the heart of the way that art is understood either as a disciplinary matter, with clear rules and limits, or, alternatively, as a free zone of exploration, in which traditional genres like painting are only optional affinities, historical points of reference. In this chapter, we will look at various cases in which these issues of definition are at stake. In combination, they suggest that painting’s very centrality to art in the past is exactly what makes it a useful exploratory tool in our own trans-disciplinary present.

Paint, seemingly the “rawest” of art materials, is in fact highly processed stuff. It is composed of two principal ingredients: the pigment (historically, crushed minerals like lapis lazuli for blue, cadmium for red, and lead or titanium for white); and a binder, most commonly oil or acrylic, though egg white and other natural and artificial substances can be used as well. Until the nineteenth century, artists either made up their own paints, or bought them from “colormen,” artisans who sourced and mixed the ingredients to order. In the mid-nineteenth century paint became an industrial product, made in factories. It became a mass-produced commodity. Just like any other mass-produced commodity, it can be appropriated as a found object or “readymade,” in the manner initiated by Marcel Duchamp. This possibility was famously voiced in the 1960s by the artist Frank Stella, who claimed that he wanted to keep his paint “as good as it was in the can.”²

The understanding of paint as a readymade remains key today. Thierry de Duve’s liberal definition of painting, including his assertion about Barry “remaining a painter,” rests on this idea; as he has argued in an essay entitled “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” all artistic materials are in some respects “assisted” (or manipulated) found objects.³ None of us can create matter out of nothing. All artists are, at least to some degree, reacting to a pre-existing set of conditions, rearranging as well as making. Painters are no exception.

So how do artists keep the paint “as good as it was in the can,” that is, engage with the broader possibilities of art-making that were inaugurated with the readymade? This does not necessarily mean thinking about painting as a purely theoretical, dematerialized, or poetic activity. On the contrary, the main tendencies in late twentieth-century abstraction involved a dialectic, in which paint’s status as a readymade existed in a dynamic relationship to its identity as an expressive medium. This is one of the many ideas that artists took from Jackson Pollock. Each splash of paint that lies atop or soaks into his canvases, each dribble and drip, is legible as a gesture, but also as a simple deposit of the unmixed industrial paint onto the canvas.

Helen Frankenthaler, at work in her studio, 1969

This doubling, in which paint is handled by the artist even as it is left intact and “pure,” was particularly important for a subsequent generation of artists known as Color Field painters, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, and Sam Gilliam. Before the 1950s, whether working on panel, canvas, or some other material, painters had typically laid down a base (a “primer”) before applying the pigment. Abstract Expressionists and then Color Field artists skipped this step, working directly on the cotton cloth. In Frankenthaler’s early work, in which she poured and rubbed her paints by hand, one can often see a halo of oil as it leaches into the fibers of the canvas. Later on, artists switched to quick-drying acrylic resin or Magna (a paint invented in 1947 in which mineral spirits are used in combination with acrylic). Artists were just as associated with particular techniques as they were with their pictorial vocabularies: Olitski with his use of the spray gun; Louis with his virtuosic controlled pours, which extended a great distance along the canvas. Gilliam, perhaps more than any other Color Field painter, explored a wide repertoire of physical acts of mark-making: masking, splashing, and particularly folding of the canvas, which yielded symmetrical, Rorschach-blot forms. He sometimes eschewed stretchers, preferring to drape his works, producing parallels between the canvas and the house-painter’s drop cloth, and thereby making associations between his practice and the skilled trades. Gilliam would sometimes set his paint can directly on the surface of the work, imprinting a neat circle amidst the surrounding chaos of pigment.

Sam Gilliam, Along, 1969. Acrylic on canvas, 111 × 144 × 2 in. (281.9 × 365.8 × 5.1 cm)

The emphasis that American Color Field artists laid on the materiality and tools of painting has carried on to the present. The best-known example is Gerhard Richter’s use of a squeegee (a long, flat, hard rubber blade) to push wet paint across the surface of his works. This technique depersonalizes and randomizes his initial gestures, creating a vertiginous confusion between that which is meant and that which is purely chance. Though the overall impression imparted by Richter’s abstract works is one of control – each has a distinctive look and emotional tenor, created by the palette and a specific vocabulary of mark-making – any given individual detail might or might not be intentional. This is Richter’s contribution to the tradition of paint-as-readymade: in his paintings, craftsmanship and chance operations coincide and merge, so that they are indistinguishable from one another.

Gerhard Richter at work. Still from Corinna Belz’s film Gerhard Richter Painting, 2011

Much earlier than Richter, and even before the Color Field artists, a more aggressive and embodied articulation at the intersection of chance and intention was staged by the Japanese avant-garde group known as the Gutai Art Association, particularly the artist Kazuo Shiraga. Beginning in the late 1950s, he quite literally began to wrestle with the idea of paint, adopting a whole-body process method of application. In pieces like his Untitled (1959), large thick strokes of black and blood-red radiate out from a clotted, dark center. Made by the artist’s feet as h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Painting
• 2. Woodworking
• 3. Building
• 4. Performing
• 5. Tooling Up
• 6. Cashing In
• 7. Fabricating
• 8. Digitizing
• 9. Crowdsourcing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Picture Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright