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 (Cont.)

Question: I was wondering, really thinking about your paintings Ross, how you were saying that in oil painting it never felt the sublime for yourself and also when you were sort of making work sort of churches and coming from that sort of atheist background. And I think I was wondering where you feel the sort of importance or power lies in those works when you are accessing things which you don’t personally subscribe to and what room is left in making works like that for aesthetics?

RS: Well to respond to the first part, I mean the very reason that I don’t believe in God, let’s say, is the very reason that I want to kind of try to find out where that power resides in the formal accumulation of things like hymns, for example. These words in relation to the melody or whatever that are so powerful formally that they could almost induce me to have faith but the intellect is always too strong. But nevertheless, I can see that they’re so powerful that I really want to explore and find out and almost try to be converted, let’s say, or to expose myself as much as possible. And really when I’m, for example in these works, when I’m singing these songs let’s say or making a video when I’m singing these songs, I mean it’s not like a show or an act or something, I’ve really kind of spent a long time, you know, researching and looking at it, and learning them and reading them and immersing myself in it quite truly. I’m not kind of kidding on, it’s not ironic, let’s say, which is often what some people sort of throw at me. And, also I would say similarly with this show it’s not ironic, from my perspective anyway. In terms of aesthetics, I don’t know, I mean I suppose basically I come from a tradition of work which is ideas driven as was discussed a moment ago, I think Tom touched on it, so I tend to, you know, try to find the tools in the tool box that best…, they can allow me to you know build whatever it is I want to try to construct. And with the idea of the sublime as well, maybe it’s not that I don’t, I don’t accept it or don’t like it or anything, I just, I feel kind of personally at a kind of loss because I…, I don’t get it, I don’t feel it. I mean a couple of years ago, I went to the Rothko Chapel in Houston and I was really kind of open to be really moved and everything, and I just kind of wasn’t really. And I could see it, and I could put all the bits of it together and I could sort of respond to a lot of it, but the magic moment didn’t kind of happen, the sort of Road to Damascus moment. And although I haven’t really thought about it that much, I mean it could be that that experience actually for me, informed a bit of this, ’cos I’ve been thinking about this project for a few years, and I have developed it in different ways, I’ve tried out different things. So I’m not, or I don’t want to be dismissive, I feel I’m trying to find it for myself. I’m trying to see where that moment could be, or revelation, or change, but I just always feel that the my mind is, for me anyway too, not too strong, but I can’t overcome the kind of mechanics of thinking about it in a way. But maybe that’s my loss [mock tears].


Question: I’m not really sure how to ask this question, but I’m wondering if it would be possible to talk a bit about what appears to be the proliferation of representational painting at the moment or the relatively small amount of abstraction being made at the moment, or do you think that’s even, now, at the moment, a useful distinction to be making - or a useful thing to talk about?

DB: It’s not a distinction I make when I’m looking at a painting or any art. But I know a man who does. I know, for example, someone like Nick Serota, or maybe someone like John Latham, seems to divide the world between figurative painting and abstract painting and everything sort of divides along that fault line. It just doesn’t for me because of so much work which seems indifferent to those divisions. And there doesn’t seem to be anything, for me, at stake in that division now, but there clearly was for other generations of critics and artists.

Question: If it doesn’t for you, when did it stop. Was it because at the certain point it stopped being possible or interesting to make that distinction?.

DB: I mean I love abstract art, I really do and I’m enormously looking forward to the Kenneth Noland show that’s coming up at Tate Liverpool because he’s clearly still the most unfashionable artist in the universe I think. And it always feels slightly old fashioned to say that I love abstract art. Very quickly I want to withdraw my Zurbarán thing from before otherwise you’ll think I’m just into bottles. Instead I’m going on an Eva Hesse drawing for my ‘take home’ work for today because there’s almost, almost nothing there.

JC: Yeah, Barry do you have a response to Louise [Hopkin]’s question?

BS: Yeah,… my thought, as I’ve tried to give an indication before, is I think these days, which is different from what I thought for a long time. You know before I kind of thought more or less like what he said, you know, it doesn’t matter anymore, that, you know, there are too many kind of grey areas and hybrids in between and there’s no, no divide. And I still think that there’s no divide. But I also have come around to the idea that to talk about the distinction between abstract and representation isn’t quite right, because actually representation isn’t even it, representation to me belongs to a historical era that’s kind of closed. And it means something very different to me to say image, than to say representation. And I think that for a while it did somehow seem important to a lot of people to deal with images, and that’s something that I sort of want to try and get to understand better. I don’t have, you know, a kind of set position on it, this is kind of project of mine I want to look into. Whereas before I thought that, well, today representational painting is already really abstract anyway. Now I think today, abstract paintings are really already images. So it’s sort of switched over.

TL: I would add just some sort of local - different locality but local… Amongst the painters who are pretty visible at the moment in Los Angeles, quite a number of them work within an abstract-looking mode which is in fact sort of tightly woven with image and representation and language, and, you know, someone like Monique Prieto switches back and forth, Ingrid Calame looks like abstraction but they’re really heavily constructed images. I don’t think you can say there’s a divide exactly.

DB: That does bring up something that I’m often reminded of… Monique Prieto, Ingrid Calame was mentioned, also Linda Besemer and Polly Apfelbaum, a lot of those artists are people working in the States. And there is a curious thing that whereas traditionally abstract art was seen as the preserve of men, it seems very prominently an art engaged in by women, and it has been for the last ten or so years. I don’t have any explanation for that at all.

JC: Do, do we have any more questions?

Question: I just wanna pick up on that a little bit, I mean there are probably two, three themes that, you know, at least I have picked up from today from all those presentations that we had. And I think you know take the last one, like when abstraction and representation actually fall together because it was part of, I think you called it, the image reality anyhow. Somehow I feel this is probably the end to something like a struggle which has driven or which was the motor for a lot of discourse going on among artists and in the art world. And then there is another theme, both Ross and Tom mentioned that actually, saying I think something like: ‘I use painting as a strategy’. Is there actually all of a sudden a need to have a strategy in order to, well, feel you are allowed to paint?

TL: I think actually my position is I think that was the case, but I’m not so sure it is anymore. That I think we’ve passed the period of strategizing and entered some other area.

BS: Is the ‘we’ there a generational ‘we’ or is there more to ‘we’.

TL: Probably generational, but I’m reluctant to speak for a generation. And I certainly can’t speak for more than that.

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DB: You can’t even speak for yourself. [Laughter]

RS: I think for me it probably is still a strategy which sounds bad because you’ve moved on from that [Laughter]. But again, for me it’s about some idea of communication, dialogue, engaging and I’m still personally always really thinking about an audience and again, it was touched I’m not sure by whom, the sort of expectations and the ways of entering into works and in a sense, you know, I’ve, again I’m only speaking for myself, but never taken an easy route formally in terms of making things which would be generally pleasing to people, let’s say, to kind of - even as a strategy – to, you know, reel them in a bit you know. So maybe for me it is still somewhere operating on that level. Because I think actually for me everything’s a strategy really, because I’m so interested in at least an aspiration to this sort of dialogue, I’m always trying to think around everything, the whole shape of it, maybe too much.

BS: You can’t do anything without a device. You can lean to love the device. But it’s not a question about painting, really, it’s about just doing anything.

JC: Do we have what will probable be the final question?

Question: It’s a question concerning a phrase that you used earlier Barry that was a Borges term about the aesthetics of philosophy. And I guess my question is, is there some kind of intellectual evolution and absorption via the information that we all take in general through visual culture and media culture, is there some sort of kind of fusion that really traditional aesthetic experience of beauty and rapture and sensuousness combining with some sort of aesthetic experience of ideas and philosophies and intellectual concepts that is kind of informing what, if there is such a thing as an avant-garde right now and if that is being played out through painting. Is that idea of some type of new avant-garde relevant to painting and is that idea of the aesthetics of philosophy - I don’t know exactly much about - how does that factor in I guess, or maybe could you even just expand on that a bit.

BS: Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s a couple of parts to what you’ve asked and I’m not exactly sure how they relate. I mean there is one question about the idea of an avant-garde and I have to say that that’s not a concept that I think has a lot of relevance to our current situation, even though I have a great love for much of what was done by the avant-gardes of the time when I can see why it made sense to want to be avant-garde. But I think that our situation is just too different now to kind of share that. Right that’s the one part, then the other part is about looking about philosophical students aesthetically vis-à-vis Borges and I guess I’m not sure exactly what your question was about that.

RS: Can I just say, I was just thinking as you were asking that it made me think that at first I thought you were just sort of describing quite a straightforward model of modern art, kind of thing, with these two, you know, let’s say the formal and the intellectual sort of thing, broadly speaking. But what it made me just think of really when you related it to painting, that I feel it’s important that painting shouldn’t simply assume it has a privileged position in that sort of canon anymore. And part, I suppose again for me, part of the reason for doing this show really was to try to test that to see if it could still earn its crust in some way, or could it be a conceptual tool, and you know these are just questions for me obviously that come out of my own practice. But I think that’s important to consider, you’ve got to make it work and whether I do in the show or not is another question, but generally speaking, I think it should be interrogated and tested and not just assumed to do anything really just as it shouldn’t be assumed now by sticking it in the white cube then, you know, it makes it art, let’s say, or does all the things you’re implying.

BS: Look, if I go to Venice and I look at the Bellini painting of ‘The Virgin and Child’ then whatever it is I take from the painting, I don’t have to take on board the theology that Bellini was sort of promoting through painting the painting, even though I have a general sense about what that is and I use that as part of my interpretive material, so to speak, but when I have an aesthetic experience with the Bellini painting I’m not having an experience of Catholicism. And when I go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at a Mondrian painting…

DB: You don’t become an amateur theosophist.

BS: … I become neither a theosophist nor whatever it was that he became maybe later on in his life. And I understand his ideas about the relationship of art and society and all that, but I don’t have to accept them in order to appreciate the paintings even though the more I know about them the more I understand the paintings. And I think the same thing is true when I appreciate the work of a conceptual artist. There are ideas that that person has about what the work is and about why they’re doing it, and it’s a whole philosophy and ideology that they have around how they’ve arrived at doing just, whether it’s Joseph Kosuth or whoever it is, and my appreciation of the work doesn’t entail me taking on board his ideology. Even though the work hardly seems to be made of anything else but that, you know, strangely enough. And I guess that’s sort of related to what I mean in my reference to Borges. In the same sense whether Ross’ work you wanna see as these paintings here and are they good paintings, or if you wanna see it as a broader project in which the paintings are devices that are just part of the project, in either case somehow I have to come to terms with the in cognisance of his sort of philosophy about why he’s doing what he’s doing, but somehow the work kind of gets clear of that too I think.

Question: It needs you to participate.

BS: Well it needs somebody, yeah. Yeah it needs the other person and that’s why it needs the public situation that it has.

JC: Could I maybe perhaps ask a final question I think it is, is the very long, intense, fascinating day, but there is a question I would like to ask each of the panel members. If it turns out to be too broad, too vague, too difficult just say so and we’ll just finish it there [Laughter], but I suppose my question is, throughout the day you’ve been thinking about, talking about, considering the, I suppose the testing and the problematizing of painting, and I suppose my question is whether that testing and problematizing has had such a qualitative effect, if you like, that when we speak of painting today we are speaking of something which is kind of different, that is to say that we are talking about painting as a new art?

TL: Substitute the word art for painting and I think I can go along. It is difficult to say. On the face of it is absurd to say that painting’s a new medium,... so it’s a little difficult. But I think it is true that it is now commonplace that everything is up for questioning and examination and interrogation as to why it exists and that’s why it should be considered in an art context as in some other. And so within that everything is up for grabs. Therefore older versions of art making which were once thought to be in the past are potentially viable again because they are part of that question.

DB: I’ve got a slightly simple way of answering, or referring to your question not answering it. I think in a way I guess that every time you go to the studio you have to reinvent the medium at some level. And yet the extraordinary thing about painting is that every time you do that you’ve got 500 years at least of the practice of painting breathing down your neck. And it’s a very strange relationship to try and do something which is at one level new and at the other level ludicrously ancient.

RS: That’s true,… can I say what my favourite paintings were, I never got to say [laughter]. I was going to slightly cheat actually, I want two; because while I was sort of thinking about this for the last… years actually I sort of imagined this sort of room with two paintings in it - Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhardt - all white and all black. But, of course, the key thing about them which just makes it work is imagining the space between them but, of course, one is neither all white and the other it’s, it’s not all black but it’s in that space that I wanted to place my head, sort of, while I was thinking about all these things.

DB: Bravo.

BS: Bravo.

TL: Thank you all for coming.

JC: I will not attempt to summarize. All I will do is ask you please to join me in thanking our panel: Ross Sinclair, Thomas Lawson, Barry Schwabsky, David Batchelor.

[Applause]

END