Process & Product

The following was provoked by a question posed on the Facebook group N e w A e ѕ т н e т ι c.

Terms:

• Product, taken as the result of a process.
• Process, taken as that which will result in a product.
• Process as Product, e.g. Roman Opalka's 1 to Infinity (1965-), a work which involved the filling of canvases with numbers while counting them into a recorder. Each canvas became a detail in the larger unfinished (and by definition unfinishable) work.*
• Intention/Will, as including both working from/to a plan, schema or concept and working to no plan: i.e. contingently, through accident and chance.
• Action, as doing/undoing/not-doing: doing/undoing, as actions [i.e. process]; not-doing, as finishing [i.e. product].
• Telos, as the expectation of some end [i.e. some satisfying realisation of  a pre-existing concept, or some satisfying realisation not previously conceived of].
• Satisfaction, as the condition for not-doing.

Having crudely set out these terms, let me even more crudely apply them to my own practice.

What is my process? What are my intentions? At the outset, I do not know what I want, I never do (I used to but I never quite got it so I stopped wanting it). 

Having started, what I get are various dispositions and compositions that change with my doing and undoing - these cannot be called phases or stages until there is a final product of which they could be said to be phases or stages. There is no guarantee of reaching a satisfying end, only doing and undoing.

Both necessary [i.e. to suggest a definite form] and contingent [i.e. to randomise and open up possibilities] marks can be deployed right up to the end of a picture. There are no hard technical rules in my practice regarding telos. A process could end  (a product begin) with a blob or a calculated fine line.   

A satisfying end, as defined above, is, for me, the point where the willful acts of doing and undoing are exhausted and a certain resistance from the work obliges me to not-do, to stop. What, in process, was contingent, capable of being or not being (through doing and undoing) now, as product, just is: it cannot be different - it is necessary.  

Let us imagine two reasons for satisfaction:

1) a product being the realisation of a pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to the       concept.

2) a product being the realisation of an un-pre-conceived object/idea, with process being fidelity to     the ghost of an idea that will only emerge through process [i.e. cannot be said to exist ideally               separate from the work]. 

The second reason is the one that motivates me. I make pictures to experience the haunting that the product exerts on me before it is realised. 'Haunting' is a clumsy word for what I'm describing but it serves in so far as it suggests a trace, something at the limits of consciousness. Or, perhaps better said, this ghost is my unconscious/subconscious - 'me' in the broadest and least sanitised sense.

I then, as artist, am the machine - the processor - and my products are communications from a blindly determined object (myself) to itself - the catch being that the 'self' so addressed is not the one that produced the address! The production redefines the producer. Making remakes the maker. 

* In mentioning this example, it occurs to me that, conceiving as we do of individual works as being part of a larger 'body' of work, might not these bodies themselves be both  products (histories of production) and processes (technical and thematic shifts over time)? 

I 2 U, 2015

You there, 2015

The Emptiness Inside, 2015

Notes on past practice

Self portrait - 1996

The thread of picture-making practice that I am going to lay out before you has its roots in my first engagement with art at the age of thirteen. For the sake of brevity, clarity and unbroken narrative, however, I will begin with the work I produced upon what could be called the outset of my adult career.

Being an autodidact, or “self-taught” (fundamentally oxymoronic expressions that are, sadly, difficult to elide), my practice has never been fraught with too many questions on what to produce, whether to produce, or why produce at all. I have just produced, inspired by what has stimulated and stuck with me and by a vague conviction that even the solipsistic and hermetic tendencies of spontaneous picture-making can, perhaps, challenge solipsism on its own ground – that the opacity and incomrehensibility of the putative individual is, in fact, a superstition and that, whatever else it might be, as a basic form of transmission, image making cannot help but communicate.

Triptych - 1997

                                                                      

My first paintings were in oils – a medium I felt it necessary to familiarise myself with and, if not dominate, at least make some inroads into its possibilities. The compositions were pre-draughted but my lack of technique in the application of the paint made for a certain incalculability as far as the finished image would appear. The famously protean nature of this medium is a lesson in being alive to the spontaneous life of paint itself and reinforced my existing tendency to privilege the more graphic elements in my work: line and delineated form. Faces, heads and hands were sources of fascination to me from the outset. Taken as discrete formal elements in themselves, their inter-arrangement allows for a rich field of spatially and dynamically suggestive relationships within a composition.My work in oils became freer and no longer dependent on underdrawn schema. Gradually, I tended to produce smaller works on paper and to leave the time-consuming medium of oil paint behind.

Untitled - 1997

Standing figure - 1997

More spontaneity in mark-making was my goal and in this I was particularly inspired by certain strands in the calligraphic traditions of Japan and China, where maximal effect is derived from minimal marks (the aesthetics of efficiency). The glory of this ostensibly reductive and compressing approach was its evocative amplitude. This, albeit I was grounded in the analytic current of european figuration, provided me with a cue to explore the decriptive, allusive and ambiguous properties of basic mark-making – an approach I took into life-drawing.

Life drawing - 1998

Life drawing - 1997

Somewhat obsessed with the fertile potentials of lines operating as describers, hinters, ambiguities and obstructions, my work took the form of line drawings. Here the figurative subject is evoked with minimal marking but the marks themselves are put into complex relation with each other and the form they suggest by being of different colours and thicknesses. The main subtance of the figure itself is the blank page and the lines serve to evoke this presence in absence.

Head study - 1998

Half-figure - 1998

The subsequent development was to elaborate and colour-in the plains defined by the lines. Here the plains themselves could bring with them another layer of suggestiveness and evocation through their interplay with the lines that divided them and the varying forms and colours of their fellow plain shapes.

Head series #17 - 1999

 This filling-in itself suggested the next phase, which was that of the silhouette. The background now changed from predominantly black to white and the new medium was ink rather than coloured pencil. These Accretions, as I have come to call them (for ease of cataloguing – the name could well apply to  other works), brought with them a working outwards, an expansive process of gradual accretion of ink towards the final image, whereas before the work had been one of delimiting space and then working within those limits.

Accretion (The box) - 2001

With this work, like tree rings, every phase of the drawing is preserved in the final state. The finishedimages became comments on their own evolution – and they kept and exposed the record of their making.

Large accretion (Containment) - 2001

Following on from the silhouettes, worked-out in ink, I turned to the relation of the silhouete line to itself: i.e. its implicit ambiguity, particularly when rendered with only two colours. Which is the defining line? Is there a defining line when it is the product of blocks of colour? These pictures were predominantly produced with acrylic paint. The process was still one of building up the image by acting on the suggestiveness of pre-existing marks and colours but the efficiency of the paint in covering up previous states left an archaeological hint of previous work in each finished painting, rather than the explicit record produced by the ink drawings.

Orpheus - 2002

At this point my work turned to a synthetic mode and each previous stage that had focused on a technical differentiation – i.e. open lines, closed lines, silhouette blocks and surface accretion – became part of a practical repertoire, wherein they could be combined.                                           

Now some words on intentionality.

With the exception of some early oil paintings and, infact, precisely due to frustrations and impasses relating to working out compositions in that medium, early on my work came to rest on there being no idea of the final state of the image at its outset. Progress, without an over-arching concept, was through step-by-step mark-making and the assimilation and suggestivesness of these marks – be they recognisably figurative forms ( e.g., a face, an eye, a nose, a profile) or variations on a line. I would liken it to walking in total darkness, without a visible or imaginable destination, each uncertain step an end in itself. The first mark could always be the last – there is no commitment to any degree of finish or complexity. The progression of the work depends on the suggestive power of the existing marks – whether or not to continue and, if so, how to continue are questions answered facing the physical facts available (e.g. seeing in an originally figuratively uncommitted line the possibility of a bridge of a nose, a cheek or a forearm). This response to the suggestiveness of a certain mark is always mediated and informed by the picture plane – or, put bluntly, the space available in which to imagine.

Annunciation - 2008

Angel - 2005

The final state of any picture is radically contingent. It is enough to know that it will reach a final state for it to reach it. It's particularity is unforeseeable while its ontological status – avant la lettre - is never in doubt (it will be, but I cannot know what it will be until it is).

What attends the recognition of completion is some tension between the formal (colour, compositional) elements and the representational or figurative “content” - more often than not this tension is a result of a radical ambiguity brought out by material and symbolic juxtapositions and contrasts.

This is perhaps the time to discuss the symbolic content of my work. The human figure is both form and symbol. Analyses of the human form return one with eyes refreshed to natural form. This is the realist foundation of the western tradition, expressed, among others in the Modern tradiotion through Cezanne, Matisse, Giacometti, Freud and Hockney. There is also in Modernism the path of inducing/expressing bewilderment as notably chanelled through the scuola metafisica, Dada, Surrealism and much Art Brut – these themselves springing from Symbolism and, as with the Realist school, having roots in the Renaissance (wherein Humanism flourished by accounting for both the formal/rational apprehension of the human figure and engaging the rich, syncretic psychic field of ancient and christian symbology).

And not yet nowhere - 2009

As crude as this perfunctory mapping is, these two strands are what I have always considered to be the ground of my practice - the unavoidable concerns or a priori within the western tradition. This is not to privilege one cultural tradition above others but just to state the one in which I found myself.

That the figure itself is a symbol is a fact that has remained largely unconscious throughout history.

Almost immediately, the figure is subsumed into its pictorial or cultural environment; inscribed into a determining mythos and thereby unreflectingly sublimated into a given. However, this elides the necessary inseperability of image/representation and symbolic function. Taken as a litteral stand-in for its real model, we could see a figurative image as a tool, an aide memoir, for contemplation of the real, physical condition of the human animal but, I hope it has been noticed, to regard an image in this way – as utilitarian – obliges an invocation of abstaction as liable to suspicion as the symbol itself – i.e. the semiotic reduction only works in partnership with speculative expansion.  

Le bordel ou Un bel après-midi - 2009

The symbol as mystical/superstitious object is a concept derived from such speculations, themselves divorced from the relationality which is the symbolic function – to posit its mystification is only to further mystify it. What the symbol is, as exampled by a human figure, is a recognition of the gap between the signifier and the signified but in the dialectical rather than the nominalist sense. To have present to one's senses an image of a human animal is to be inside the unavoidable questions of what it is to be and how to know it.

Having stressed the figure as symbol par excellence, I can now say a little about other symbolic elements in my work. In brief, I consider all signs and symbols available for use: essentially as marks themselves, albeit composite ones. Whether symbols are drawn from religion, alchemy, mathematics, cartoons or grafitti, their deployment is not dogmatic or didactic – there are no cryptic messages to be painstakingly unravelled by brilliant obsessives. There are, of course, interpretative possibilities but each interpreter must take their share of responsibility for his or her choices in this matter.

Interior - 2012

Fundamentally, what I want to convey is opacity. I lament the absence of opacity and so set about producing it. In this sense I am an unashamedly superficial artist. The surface is what I see and the surface is where I stay. I have no time for depth. Depth is superabundant and painfully irrelevant. What is depth now if not an all too easily imagined transparency; a network of formal relations extending through space and time, from geometries to cause and effect, in which we are but a sequence of code in a great cosmic dance that tumbles through the crystalline logic of its own determinations into infinite variation? If we are limited in our descriptive powers we can console ourselves in the belief that someone else knows the mind of God; knows where we come from and where we are going; has cognised the map.

This is all well and good and, even, mildly tranquilising but, in my experience, has little to do with being in the world. If mathematics is pure reason then art is a distinctly impure reason: it takes the contradictions, ambiguities, opacities of experience and posits them as valid data in themselves. The psychological and physical mess of life, unabstracted, unrefined, unpurified. This is realism.

Cogito ∴ sum, 2015

Walker, 2010

Haiku

A picture's

not finished

until I want

           what I get.

Interior, 2012

Haiku

The Solipsistic Palimpsest: tautologising absence and the power of an image to refer to nothing

An image's reference is constitutively ambiguous by dint of the fact that the image is itself discrete. Its ontological limitation – its definition – constitutes it as a thing in itself and, therefore, as radically separate from whatever it may be said to refer to.

This gap or elementary difference is even present in non-representational (abstract) art where the object exists simultaneously as its substance and its own image but the two modes of existence (as evidenced through reproduction) can never be wholly identified with each other.

An image, therefore, is in self-referential relation to itself as object as well as to any object it might reference by representation. The object is mute – even objects that are digitally constituted are mute to the point that their materiality is defined by a structural relationship physically describable without recourse to referencing the image or its content – this content being the referential field of the work itself.

If the image has phenomenological existence it is though referencing power – a power that includes the image itself but not the materiality that grounds it – the physical description of which is most comprehensively achieved without reference to the image as image (as referentiality).

Le bordel ou un bel après-midi, 2009

Face #2, 2009

The Message of Art

Not only is no man an island but, simply, there is no individual. This is the message of art. Not the “artist's message” which, like the putative individual, doesn't exist or, if one insists on presenting it as a discrete phenomenon, exists only on the level of total opacity and incomprehensibility.

It is precisely this chasm of subjectivity which art touches upon. To confuse it with a personal or individual profundity is, simultaneously, to mystify the human animal and to deny unknowability to human experience. It is to indulge in the magical thinking that justifies material inequality by cultivating the illusion of access to infinite self-hood and to escape from the truth of the impossibility of an unrelated self.

The face is the basic node of human communication. It has been through/with/by faces that the majority of us have come to the identity we currently advertise and to the personality we exhibit (taking personality as that encrustation of possibility dried in the sun of the contingent relationality that has made up our social environment).

Before the face is the other, the face is the self. One is what one sees and even when one sees oneself, one becomes two. So the greatest threat to the other, as an other, is that it is assumed into the self-hood of the subject which is the only agent capable of recognising – and so manifesting – the other.

Consciousness is the breakdown in the order of material efficiency (physical process). To say all art is useless is on a par with conceptualising original sin: it insights that necessity is infinite and impersonal, a universal constant or ground that doesn't need any subject to exist.

The mothering of invention is not the field of human genius but its matrix. The subject as such, whether inspired or not, is the radical openness to this void of ownership – this unrelenting and unconscious drive to produce. 

Here then, self is negative experience. It is what is not present: a lived absence that opens a gap in the illusion of the permanence of an ever changing world.

Remarks on mark making, marks and suggestion

To limit oneself to the suggestive power of the first mark made on a plain field and to then proceed through the growing complexity of suggested and suggesting marks to suggested and suggesting groupings of marks and then, to the suggested and suggesting final state. This is how I work.

The final state suggests its finality. The first state (the plain field) suggests a finality. The first mark suggests finality or another mark. The suggestion of finality contains the action of suggestion itself and the discrete finality of each subsequent suggested mark.

Each suggestion is a finality in itself – finalised in the mark made. The suggestion may be more or less complex, more or less precise and the realisation of the mark itself may be more or less faithful to the suggestion it realises.

The final state does not equate to a statement but, rather, to a suggestion: a suggestion itself the product of an involution of suggestion. The final state may suggest a statement but it cannot state a statement. Any suggestion of finality does not add up to a final statement.

Q. What is a picture? A. An idea for a picture.

This idea is the product, not a finished picture in itself. The picture in its physical form is only worth the picture-idea it is capable of evoking. The potential of a work is the cognizability or imaginability it induces and can support.

The idea is not distinct from the object that evokes it, rather, the evocation is the result of subject coming into contact with it. 'Subject' could be formalized as a discrete object (a human animal) but the cognitive/imaginary field cannot ever be reduced to reification in a particular material complex (i.e. human organism) as this cognitive manoeuvre itself must take place in a perceiving and judging subject. The reducing agent is not reducible but infinitely relational and relatable.

The infinite quality (or intimation of infinity) that art seems to possess, is that quality in ourselves (in this experience we call 'being human'). It is a reflection of this experience that art effects – a projected reflection reflecting a projection.

Art only imperfectly lends itself to utilitarian purposes (such as mild social engineering via curatorial thematizing) not because 'it' struggles to say anything but because 'it' will always say more. Of course, by 'it' I mean 'we'. The art object, whatever its material and conceptual status, is a cache of communicative potential only in its ability to be perceived/conceived/received.

Perhaps this inutility is lamentable to a mind that hopes for an insect-like evolution of the human species – i.e. a constant and minimally reflective industriousness. I very much hope such a mind is absent and always will be. In answer to this disposition, art is inherently and immanently a future and utopic project in so far as it attends human beings who are not set on a goal; who are suspended¹, however briefly, from the causal chains of necessity and desire².

1Suspended, as in 'removed' but also, so as to fully profit from the verbal suggestiveness of 'suspension' and 'chains' as in 'slacking' or 'hanging around'.

2Perhaps the reason for much debate sticking on the necessity and desirability of art, is that art is an ontology of the obstruction of these engines of activity?