ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 1. No. 1. Winter 2006/07
ISSN 1752-6388

Painting As A New Medium:

Round Table: Ross Sinclair, Tom Lawson, Barry Schwabsky, David Batchelor
Chair: John Calcutt

John Calcutt: Ok. Welcome back to perhaps the most important part of the day, we’re going to open up to discussion immediately. And if you could ask questions through microphone please and as much as possible if you can try and keep the questions focused upon what the speakers have individually been dealing with.

Question: This may be slightly old fashioned, but in terms of the question that came up earlier in the discussions with Francis and Ross, and the idea of amateur works and the idea of bringing in everyday the way Rauschenberg does and in the context of opening up different mediums and not thinking specifically in terms of painting.1. How do you think you begin and do we even need to bother addressing the issue of quality?

David Batchelor: Is that addressed to anyone in particular?

Question: No, no it’s not.

David Batchelor: I don’t mind trying to say something, not I mean it’s a good question and every artist is concerned that the work’s got to be good enough to leave the studio. How you measure that it is very hard to say. And it’s interesting what was said at the end of Ross talk about amateurism in his work, which was said about his work rather than by him, I try to change the materials I work with fairly regularly so that you don’t become too slick, painting bottles or something, you’ve gotta keep learning apart from anything else, and I’ve always tried to, you know, in a way to reinvent the work, at least the material fabric of the work fairly regularly, while at the same time trying to keep some sense of subject which holds it together. But how do you judge if it’s any good? I don’t know. I mean my answer to that is a very practical one, in that if you come back the next day and it doesn’t embarrass you then it might be ok. And if you come back the day after and it still makes you think a bit then maybe it’s got something going for it. I don’t know how else… It’s got to keep me interested. That would be the first condition I would say at least.

Barry Schwabsky: I think that any quality that you can name can be good or it can be boring, but to some extent, that sort of positional, if you know what I mean, if everything around you seems very professional, then that starts to get boring and then maybe something being amateur seems really good. If everything looks amateur, then maybe something which is really slick and professional might start to look good to you. Then, you know that’s, that’s kind of on one phase of evaluation. Then, then there is a kind of when you’ve gone through a cycle like that a few times you begin to realise well, maybe there’s more to it than that and then you step back and you start trying to sift out other kinds of qualities. But I think in terms of the more direct part of your question about amateurism, to kind of make that a positive quality doesn’t on the face of it seem to say, ‘oh well, then there’s no more judgement of quality’.

Thomas Lawson: I think also something happens as that is the longer in terms of years that you’re working with something the more you become concerned about the issues of how it’s put together. Not exactly the quality thing because I think Barry’s right that the context often dictates how you approach something I don’t, but I’m certainly much more conscious of sort of working out and thinking through how something is put together than I was when I was when I was a mere slip of a lad like Ross for instance. [Laughter]


Ross Sinclair: Well I mean I was just gonna say that I mean I quite consciously actually celebrated the idea of the amateur in quite a lot of my work over the years. And in a sense, I think tried to claim that as something quite positive. But often perhaps contextualise that within a sort of working process where it’s not simply the production of something amateurish but maybe in a broader sense the work takes in, in terms of an engagement with an audience, that idea that they’re witnessing to some degree a kind of example, let’s say of one person or one individual sort of going through a certain route or a certain, you know, interacting with a certain group of situations or whatever, so it’s in there, but it’s quite self consciously modulated maybe. But maybe that stands for something that has the possibility of a more intimate connection with an audience, I found in some works. Not particularly I think with this but…

TL: Wouldn’t you say it’s all about ‘accessibility’ in a way, I mean by laying yourself open to ‘here I am making this in front of you’ kind of thing, you’re inviting the public into the process?

RS: Yeah, definitely, in terms of the sort of dialogue which I know I, I’m always kind of interested in, it’s definitely on levels of entry into things… and also I like the idea that it can be something that’s not mediated by or less mediated perhaps than kinds of languages maybe aesthetic languages, maybe actual languages, whatever, it could be more of an easy connection.

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DB: I’ve got an example of the problem of getting too good at something which is really just sad for me because it was seeing one of the William Kentridge films yesterday. Now again I love that work, that body of work is fantastic you know, but the recent film, the single screen projection, the drawing on that now was so unbelievably professional in a way, that somehow I thought the work lost something. It made me really nostalgic about those quite early collage-based animations Kentridge made… It’s too good.

RS: I mean that is interesting. That whole body of work often is so interesting because there’s a feeling I think, it’s not so much the amateur thing, but there’s a feeling of here’s somebody who normally does this, doing this. And it’s really quite interesting because it’s informed by a whole different kind of raft of experience but channelled into another kind of medium that, in fact, reinvigorates it and explores something in it that maybe those who are more used to working in that way have kind of lost sight of.

JC: I think, as I understand it, one of the things that interested Francis McKee in framing the discussion today was this sense that in a post-media age, if we are in such, it’s painting that’s maintained its medium-specific demands; so it doesn’t seem to be problematic for an artist to make a video, for example, whereas to move into painting, if that’s not what they normally do, seems to be somehow more difficult to deal with. I just wondered in terms of this idea of accessibility, again, that it is with some idea of a sense of a confidence the audience might have in terms of what they think the artist is doing in relation to painting. I don’t know if that’s the case or not and I suppose one can never tell.

Question: I can’t remember which one of you said it, but you were saying that when you go to [Art] school, you start off as a painter and then you go on to something else. Do you ever find it’s the other way around, like people start off as a sculptor and go into painting? Can you talk about that?

DB: That’s never happened in the history of western art. [Laughter] I know of many, many people, myself included, from my generation at least, I can’t speak beyond that, for whom painting, and drawing obviously, was what you did and somehow you stumbled out doing something else. As for the reverse, I don’t know.

BS: I have a story about that actually because my wife is an artist and she went to college actually not for art, but she studied economics and philosophy and then after working in the real world for a number of years she realised she couldn’t bear that and she started making art and she went to art school and got an MFA. And she studied performance and video and she got her degree in that and she never learned anything about painting. And from performance and video she got into making sculpture and that’s when I met her, when she was making sculpture and then, eventually, she started to make some paintings. And I thought I would help her out because she was very busy and so I started stretching canvases for her and she was very happy about that and one day I said to her, well do you want me to gesso the canvases for you? And she said: ‘Oh no, I, I like to gesso them myself because it helps me get in touch with the canvas.’ I thought, oh god, you know, they become mystics just by using the materials, they don’t even have to be taught it. So anyway but that’s one who went the other way.

RS: And I can probably say in a sense with this project of mine I’ve kind of done that to a certain extent. Not coming out of a painting tradition and, in fact, always working in an extremely wide range of formal kind of media. To such an extent that actually, over the last few months, it’s been an extreme relief to say to taxi drivers when they say: ‘Oh, so what do you mate, eh?’ ‘Eh, I’m an artist.’ ‘Oh what’s, what do you do then?’ ‘Well it’s kind of big scale installations. And sometimes I’m performing and sometimes I do music in them as well.’ ‘What!?’ But this time I can say: ‘Oh, painting. I’m doing a painting show.’ ‘Painter, yeah?’ So that was kind of different.

JC: As I was saying earlier, it does seem me its kind of interesting or it’s quite difficult, it seems to me, to talk about painting without somehow its kind of history and position coming in tow. But I don’t know whether it’s possible to answer this Ross but whether in that sense when you are working on those pieces, do you feel a kind of responsibility to painting in the abstract, in the general?

RS: Not responsibility, but I mean a definite attempt to try to better understand the immense power and force of the kind of canon of works which, interestingly, everyone has broadly been kind of touching on today. And I suppose in general and in my own work perhaps as I mentioned earlier, as youthful desires to change the world change into middle aged spread or something, a sort of reappraisal for me of well here’s a strategy that I’ve been trying for a decade or two decades or whatever and I’d really like to think about could another way to do it [exist] that could be much simpler or, or just different to look at the properties and in that sense, the I mean there is incredible allure to the works mentioned, you know broadly speaking circa late 50s or whatever, into the 60s where, I mean, for me, the certainty and the confidence and the sheer thinking knowing-your-rightness of them all at that point is in a sense again a sort of broadly discussed, you could say after that point, it’s the sort of squelching sideways a bit and it’s the no longer linear progressing, it’s everything bubbling up in a big sort of cloud rather than in any kind of line. So in a sense, going back to just before the cloud and at the end of the road sort of thing and seeing what the shape of that was somehow and to see at that moment when those things changed of like probably say a hundred years of modernism into something else and where nothing was so certain again. So I don’t know that’s sort of a bit of a rambling reply.

1. The reference here is to Moira Jeffrey’s article on Glasgow International, ‘Portrait of a Rock Star as artist’, The Herald (April 21, 2006) which unfavourably referred to Sinclair as an ‘amateur painter’.

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