ART&RESEARCH

What interests me a lot about the work in the 1960s is where they reinvented material practice of painting. What I had in mind, for example, was both the shaped canvases of Frank Stella but also the paints he used. Stella very famously said he wanted his paintings to look as good as they were in the can, the whole point is that he made paintings out of tins of paint rather than tubes of paint. It’s industrial colour, it’s commercial colour, it’s not artists’ colour. It seems that this whole generation of artists did as much as they could to get away from traditional materials of art or painting. So you have tins of copper paint or enamel or aluminium paint used by Stella but also by a number of other artists. [Warhol, Marylin] Warhol’s fabulous body of work which is not mainly painting, well do you think of Warhol as a painter, I don’t know, they’re screenprints with some paint on them. But also Warhol’s range of materials, you include, piss, diamond dust, silver, oxidisation, and other were non-art, non-spectrum colours and materials. [Slide] A close up of the campest Donald Judd you’ll ever seen, its copper with fluorescent pink plexi-glass, and unfortunately the slide gives nothing of the strangeness of the materials and the colour.

I started talking about medium, I moved into talking about materials, I’m doing that then in order to talk about colour. As we’ve been threatening to talk about all day. I think the, the value of these artists for me, and others - [Slide} a Judd Colour Chart, to remind me to talk about how, for these generations of artists and for many, many since, that the organisation of colour is not done according to the colour circles, to the traditional predicates of colour theory, but through occupying the commercially available systems of colourments in the colour chart. Which makes in a way, every colour you use a readymade. It’s something you can go out and buy and apply rather than would mix up in the studio or something. And certain colour the way I think about is as a readymade. And a readymade of the everyday world of the city. And I think it’s clearly the case for all these artists and many others that the subject of the work, whether they are a colourist, I think they are all colourist in one way or another. The subject of the work is not the colours of nature, but the colours of the modern urban environment. And maybe Fried was right that the world have become impossible for painting to represent in its traditional forms, because I think the traditional forms of painting and what they were based on were calibrated to representing the effects of nature. And I think that for Rauschenberg, for Judd, for Stella it’s about dealing with, if you like, the surfaces of the modern city more than anything else. And oil painting is not very good at doing that. Or at least I couldn’t make it do that which is probably the more personal way of saying it.

[Slide] A very early Dan Flavin. I saw these earlier works of Flavin from 1962 or so before his signature works using neon flashing lamps.

I saw them when I was going round a private collection in New York. They are these two weird things, they are paintings, small 2 foot square boxy paintings with a light stuck inside. That seemed an extremely unlikely thing to do. And an extremely unlikely thing to make any sense, and yet somehow they kind of weirdly worked. This painting that didn’t want to be a painting, but didn’t know what else to be at the time. Art historians would call them transitional works. I think they’re fantastic, strange, irregular, occasional pieces.

If your interest in a subject is surface of the modern city and the kind of colours it generates, the one thing one has to attend to is that area where most colour takes place which is through electricity, petro-chemicals and illumination. Just not too get stuck on the North Americans, I think John Latham, his early work from the late 1950s 1960s is fabulous example of the medium of painting corrupted, contaminated by books, by text, by other materials which seem always to stand outside the medium painting. And yet, I think they are some of the best paintings made in the UK at the time, far better than most English pop art for example.

Another artist I want to keep within this cluster is Eva Hesse, who we think of probably as a post-minimalist sculptor, but in a way her work seems to me to come fundamentally out of painting. And in a way what it does, is that it spills beyond the frame of painting, exceeds the frame and quite literally in some of the works their frames were hanging off the wall. Her later work is flexible, soft, formalist materials. But still for me, there’s a great shot which I wish I’d brought with me of Hesse’s studio with all these drooping, gloopy, objects all hanging off the wall. But if it’s hanging off the wall then to me at least, it’s still in the realm of painting at some level.

[Slide] I’ve got a few slides of Judd’s materials to point out that sense that if you’re interested in the surfaces and the experience of the modern city, and you’re trying to represent it, you’ve got to, it seems to me - and these artists certainly felt they absolutely need to - deal with these colours and details head on, not by representing them through other means but by using those actual materials themselves, and that was to say plastics, metals, shiny surfaces, mirrors, reflective elements like that. Here’s a few of Judd’s materials from his own descriptions or titles of his work: orange pebbled plexi-glass and hot rolled steel; galvanised iron; black anodised aluminium and bronze plexi glass; red fluorescent plexi-glass and steel; stainless steel and amber plexi-glass; turquoise enamel on aluminium; hot rolled steel and turquoise enamel; Harley Davidson hi-fi red; 1958 Chevrolet Regal Turquoise. There’s a fantastic rich list of colours and material. The point and the curious thing about them is that none of them are traditional spectrum colours. It’s fluorescent, bronze, turquoise, Harley Davidson and so forth. For Flavin it was the kind of colours available through fluorescent light.

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