Painting, History and Meaning

Sites of Time

Craig Staff

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789383300
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Técnicas artísticas

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting's relationship with time and with events, ideas and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard's determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past.

A unique examination of the relationship that contemporary painting has with history and historical material, Painting, History and Meaning is a timely response to, and discussion of, how contemporary painters and artists have addressed a significant area of concern for both practitioners and theorists in recent years.

Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between painting and history.

Primary readership will be the fine art academic community, art and painting practitioners, scholars and academics. Will appeal to second and third year undergraduate and postgraduate students of fine art and art history. Of interest to students of cultural studies, history, curatorial studies and continental philosophy, and to those in the visual arts wanting to develop their understanding of contemporary art.

1

More Memory and More Future

Before an image, however old it may be, the present never ceases to reshape, provided that the dispossession of the gaze has not entirely given way to the vain complacency of the “specialist.” Before an image, however recent, however contemporary it may be, the past never ceases to reshape, since this image only becomes thinkable in a construction of the memory, if not the obsession. Before an image, finally, we have to humbly recognise this fact: that it will probably outlive us, that before us it is the element of the future, the element of permanence. The image often has more memory and more future than the being who contemplates it.¹

Writing in “Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of Anachronism,” Georges Didi-Huberman identifies three discrete temporalities at work within a fresco painted by Fra Angelico for the San Marco convent in Florence during the 1440s. In the first instance, he observes that the painting's trompe l'oeil frame stems from what would have been the prevalent mimetic style during the period within which the fresco was painted and in this respect, is “euchronistic” or of its time.² However, the fresco also betrays “anachronistic” qualities through its so-called “mnemonic” use of color.³ Finally, “the dissimilitudo, the dissemblance at work in this painted surface goes back even further.”⁴ Whilst Didi-Huberman's analysis is directed toward the particularities of a Quattrocento fresco, what he was presented with following his analysis, namely an object of “complex, impure temporality” can arguably be extended to encompass all of the examples that the following five chapters will consider.⁵ That said, whilst the subject of our interpretation foregrounds multiple and often competing layers of chronology, tense and time, the corollary of this understanding, as Didi-Huberman contends, namely “how are we to be equal to all the temporalities that this image, before us, conjugates on so many levels?” will also have to be addressed, if not logically worked through.⁶

As a means to establish some of the more salient issues with respect to the central focus of this study, the initial task will be to examine and seek to respond in turn to what Didi-Huberman asks of painting, and, by extension, what painting, grounded as it were within an ostensibly conjugate series of temporalities, asks of the viewer. To this end, the following chapter will seek to examine particular moments within painting's history wherein questions of its temporality were brought to the fore. Moreover, the application of at least some of these determinations will be considered within the context of painting as it has been understood within a more recent series of interpretive frameworks. To aid our undertaking, the chapter will be broken down into three sections that respectively will be structured within the three tenses of the past, the present, and the future.

Writing in “Painting and Time” in 1985, John Berger makes the following observation:

Clearly if one considers an artist's life-work or the history of art, one is treating paintings as being, partly, records of the past, evidence of what has been. Yet this historical view, whether used within a Marxist or an idealist tradition, has prevented most art experts from considering – or even noticing – the problem of how time exists (or does not) within painting.⁷

This problematic is echoed by Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel:

“Art” is the name of the possibility of a conversation across time, a conversation more meaningful than the present's merely forensic construction of the past. A materialist approach to historical art leaves the art trapped within its original symbolic circuits. It tends not even to notice that the artwork functioned as a token of power, in its time, precisely by complicating time, by reactivating prestigious forebears, by comparing events across time, by fabricating memories…⁸

A response to this fundamental problematic will hopefully emerge over the course of this study's following chapters. For now, our focus works outwards from the following admission, namely that all paintings are, in one respect, “records of the past, evidence of what has been.” However, even with this basic admission, there are at least two meanings that determine how it can be understood. First, painting functions as a tangible marker for the artist's activity and for the various decisions that have led to the finished object. In this respect, such decisions become concretized through the object's facture and when given in their entirety, function as the painting's surface. To approach painting this way, that is, as a material record of production is at the same moment to acknowledge that this record will only ever be partial, incomplete, and as a tangible document or marker of an artist's intentions, vestigial. Whilst any painting can, on one level, be approached as a configuration of traces (the subject of Didi-Huberman's analysis “still bears the trace of its original spurt”), the possibility that the work of art could be organized around the so-called trace effects of production only became a reality within the context of artistic practice during the twentieth century.⁹ So, for example, Jasper Johns's lithograph of 1963 Skin with O'Hara Poem consists of an imprint of the artist's face and hands. This work followed directly on from a series of drawings that the artist had produced utilizing the same basic process. Having covered both his hands and face in baby oil, Johns pressed down onto the surface of the paper and then vigorously worked over the oil-stained sheets with charcoal, revealing in the process the ghost-like imprints of his hands and face.

On one level, “the material trace of a fugitive body” that Skin with O'Hara Poem pictures stems directly from the body's withdrawal.¹⁰ Moreover, the work is reliant upon an understanding whereby proximity between bodies or surfaces (or indeed body's surfaces) is given over to the disembodied, vestigial information that has become inscribed as a result.

To construe the visible conditions of such an event within a particular set of interpretive frameworks would inevitably involve seeking recourse to the understanding that Skin With O'Hara Poem functions as an indexical sign type.

It was perhaps the American pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce who first sought to systematically map out a genus of sign types and the particular operations within the methodological field of semiotics that they are characterized by.

As Martin Lefebvre notes, on one level Peirce's taxonomization of semiosis resulted in the Syllabus. This had originally been written in conjunction with a series of lectures he had delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Massachusetts in 1903.¹¹

Rather than rehearse Peirce's formulations here, for the purposes of our enquiry it will be sufficient to note that unlike the iconic sign type that, according to Peirce, functions through resemblance and the symbolic sign type that operates by way of convention or established laws, Peirce construed the indexical sign type as “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object.”¹² In this respect then and following Peirce's formulation, various phenomena could potentially be understood within such terms. For example, a footprint in the snow, the stain left on a newspaper by the bottom of a coffee cup, and the tire marks left on the road after the driver was forced to break, all proffer the “ability to stand for something by virtue of an existential connection to it.”¹³ Moreover, and as Pierce observes:

Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection.¹⁴

This quotation, although deriving from Pierce's own formulation of the index's ontology, was subsequently used by Rosalind Krauss as the means by which certain approaches to abstract painting could be considered.

In “Notes on the Index Part 2,” originally written in 1977, Krauss articulated the significance of the index in terms of it being inscribed within two mutually exclusive visual registers. Whereas the first was pictorial, and to this end encompassed the work of an artist like Jackson Pollock, the second was photographic, with reference being made to the artist Lucio Pozzi. Regarding the first model of the index, i.e., the pictorial, Krauss claimed that the pressure to use indexical signs as a means of establishing presence began with Abstract Expressionism with deposits of paint expressed as imprints and traces.¹⁵ Writing seventeen years later, Krauss would develop the idea of a pictorial determination of the index by way of considering how the work of certain modernist artists, including Pollock and Cy Twombly, mobilized a particular relationship with time. Likening the particular approach to mark-making that the artists adopted to that of the graffitist meant that she was able to discern a temporality that underscored each artist's approach to studio production:

With the graffito, the expressive mark has a substance made up by the physical residue left by the marker's incursion: the smear of graphite, the stain of ink, the welt thrown up by the penknife's slash. But the form of the mark – at this level of “expression” – is itself peculiar; for it inhabits the realm of the clue, the trace, the index. Which is to say the operations of form are those of marking an event – by forming it in terms of its remains, or its precipitate – and so in marking it, of cutting the event off from temporality of its making.¹⁶

By cleaving apart the event from its subsequent inscription, what Krauss's statement evinces is the propensity not so much for the index to relegate or confer onto the artwork a past, for that is an indelible aspect of any artifact, but rather to use the index as the means by which the temporal...