Painting Beyond the Frame: Animation and Alchemy By Chris Soul
Painting Beyond the Frame: Animation and Alchemy By Chris Soul
Painting from Chris Soul, Metamorphosis: The Creation, Painting-Animation
The snake bites its own tail... an egg?... creation always occurs haphazardly, randomly, it begins before it has begun. Where to begin- How do words form- How is a sentence to be constructed? Does creation emerge from chaos or from a question... Is a question a form of chaos? Is this the appropriate way to begin an essay; a muddle of words seeking a beginning? Frames of thought- frames of activity- a mark is made- it is a word. The phoenix begins to rise: a metaphor, a sign. A first question: how does a painting, like words on a page, emerge from chaos, from the initial marks or the initial questioning? Beginning an essay with a blank slate is much like beginning a painting with a blank canvas. Perhaps one knows where the essay or the painting will proceed. There are some first questions like a deliberation in front of the blank space. Yet somehow as the first marks are made like a word on a page, or a form on a canvas, a process begins. This process can sometimes be haphazard or random yet from this chaos emerges creation. This is essentially an activity. I type these words in the same way as I lay a mark on a canvas and there is always a sense of the unknown of where the next frame- of activity- may lead... Perhaps the beginning of
this essay is not concise enough, perhaps it’s not getting to the point of matters quickly enough- or perhaps it is, perhaps this is the best way to demonstrate the point in hand, quite literally, anyway. Where will the next frame of activity lead... What is painting?
The Autonomy of Painting: Flatness and the Sign -Flatness- Painting has concerned itself with the notion of 'flatness.' In 1960 the critic Clement Greenberg wrote 'Modernist Painting' and advocated the purity and independence of the medium of painting. He also defined the 'flatness' of the picture plane. He writes that the 'ineluctable flatness of the support... remained most fundamental in the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself Clement Greenberg by Phyllis Herfield, 1984 under modernism' and 'flatness, two dimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so modernist painting orientated itself to flatness.' What Greenberg advocated was the autonomy of the picture plane or the surface of painting. Modernist painting concerns itself purely and exclusively with the two-dimensional; the autonomy and uniqueness of the picture on the wall. So when a painter stands in front of a canvas or a board the painter must recognise that he is working within a two dimensional limit, in the same way as I am typing these words within the 'flatness' of this computer screen. Painting therefore must 'orientate itself with flatness.' The critic Michael Fried wrote in 'Art and Objecthood' that 'modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood... it must be pictorial.' Painting should not be defined as an object; it is simply a pictorial thing, a two-dimensional plane. Yet it is a plane which is framed like the margins of a page. Therefore it is perhaps important to recognize that whatever is within the frame and on the flatness of the surface is significant, and this is the paint itself- the words, the marks, the pigment itself. The next question to ask is not 'what is painting?' but what are these marks on this twodimensional plane? In Julian Bell's book 'What is Painting' he writes that 'whenever we find them, we expect to find some marks on a surface, marks that together claim our attention. Calling the flat thing formed by the marks and the surface a 'painting', we think of it as a particular type of human product.' This is perhaps the important thing; that painting is a human product or more specifically the marks made on a surface are human products or human signs. Cave painting concerned itself with mark making and even hierogylphics are an example of mark making becoming a visual language. Yet, what is a mark when we consider painting within
the limits of its frame and two-dimensionality? Mark making can be considered as a visual language. Words or the alphabet are simply marks that have evolved to have meaning. In the same way, a mark on a canvas is like a word in syntax. Bell writes that 'a mark is a sign you can see. A sign, in logic, is something which points beyond itself; something which means.' If we are to adopt the theory of semiotics from Ferdinand Saussure then we Apple and Table by Rene Magritte have a signifier, the mark, and the signified, its meaning. We have the word APPLE typed here in capitals and these imprints of ink on the page AP- P- L- E are marks which signify a meaning; a green round fruit you eat. This is representation. A mark represents a meaning outside of itself. When Greenberg writes 'the first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness' it is not just because the mark conveys an illusion of a third dimension or depth but that the mark points beyond itself- it means. A painting of an apple points beyond the frame to the actual apple lying in the studio. Right now the word 'apple' makes me think of the painted apple represented in the lecture film which accompanies this essay. Painting is constantly referencing beyond itself because essentially a painting is made of marks, and these marks are signs which are a part of a human sign system. Rene Magritte's 'The Treachery of Images' 1928-9 is a series of paintings with words written underneath. There is a painting or an image of a pipe with words underneath with the connotation that the pipe is actually not a pipe. The painted marks signify in their use that what we see is a pipe and yet the words below signify the opposite. However, this work by Magritte demonstrates how treacherous signs can be. Of course the image is not a pipe it is a painting of a pipe, not the pipe itself, and even the word 'pipe' is not physically a pipe. 'The Treachery of Images' highlights the difficulty of representation. The painted pipe is a signifier not a signified and yet the marks of paint made by Magritte denote the representation of a pipe. A problem
though is what is the difference Ceci n’est pas une pipe by Rene Magritte between a painting of a pipe, a photograph of a pipe or an actual pipe? Right now I am looking at a photograph of the painting of the pipe in a book... The signs or marks made on a canvas have many meanings and sometimes a painting can offer a kind of incomplete communication. For example, suppose Magritte painted another pipe but this pipe was not painted so realistically. Perhaps Magritte painted a pipe using expressive broad marks. What does an expressive broad mark signify and what does this add or take away from our understanding of the pipe? In my own practice as a painter I have painted an 'expressive' painting of Duchamp's urinal. It is labelled 'expressive' because the marks I made on the board suggest this, but has the urinal simply become an expressive urinal? Marks in a painting are not always obvious to their meaning. Marks can be halfsignifiers, semi-signifiers; it is not always possible to recognize what meaning a mark is pointing to---- Jackson Pollock's drips of paint on a canvas are signifiers with no definitive meaning---- It could be suggested they signify his anger or some other psychological or emotional state but the meaning is never fixed. Indeed the marks or signs in a painting are never concrete and we should never expect complete communication from a painting. The painter Philip Guston developed his own personal visual language with his paintings in the 1960s and 1970s. He paints hands, faces, ladders, bottles, cigarettes; they are like his own personal signifiers or motifs. Before he was a part of the New York School creating abstract expressionist works in a similar way to Pollock, and yet with the newer paintings it is as if out of the expressive abstract marks of before have developed these simple signs representing seemingly trivial things. However these signs seem wholly arbitrary or contingent; their meanings are not fixed. There seems to be little concrete meaning in figures that look like Ku Klux Klan men or little meaning in hands that point in one direction. As Bell writes, Guston 'descended in his late work from evoking the sublimes of abstraction to evoking the ridiculous of the all-too-human failure to communicate.' It is like Guston developed from a phrase like this 'tyuhagbuwqubrossohg' (abstract marks) to a phrase like this 'hands face ladder bottle' (contingent signifiers.) Guston himself once said 'I imagine wanting to paint as a cave man would, when nothing has existed before...I should like to paint like a man who has never seen a painting, but this man, myself, lives in a world museum.' It is as if Guston is painting a fragmented language of the world around him, much as a cave painter marked the animals he had seen on the walls of his cave. In my own practice I have produced paintings of windows, traffic cones, street lights; they are signifiers that once painted offer incomplete communication as are the marks that make them. They become signifiers in a fragmented
syntax. Snake- head- egg- black.... as are the marks in between them. Philip Guston
Jackson Barry in 'Art, Culture and the Semiotics of Meaning' develops his own interesting system of how art can 'make meaning.' He has two planes: the 'expression plane' and 'the content plane'. The 'expression plane' (perhaps we could identify it with 'flatness' or the 'pictorial plane') has two subsidiaries: 'Matter' and 'Form.' 'Matter' may be the 'oils and washes of the painter, the bodily gestures of the dancer, sounds of a musician etc.' 'Form' as Barry writes is 'the product of those arrangements of the matter made possible by the physical nature of the matter itself.' The 'content plane' has several meanings. The first is the meaning of 'form' and 'matter' in the 'expression plane'. Therefore it is the meaning conveyed by the paint and canvas itself or the meaning of the marks themselves on that pictorial plane, like Pollock's drip marks or 'tyuhagbuwqubrossohg'. The second meaning of the 'content plane' is the connotional and denotational meaning of the 'expression plane.' This is the meaning conveyed by the signifieds (connotionals) and signifiers (denotationals) inherent in the work itself, like the meaning of Guston's heads, bottles and ladders or 'hands face ladder bottle.' It could be suggested that 'flatness' or the two dimensional picture plane is like the 'expression plane.' It is like a framed arena for using matter and form, pigment and marks. Pointing beyond the frame of the painting or the 'expressive plane' is meaning or the 'content plane.' Perhaps the 'content plane' is what connects viewer and painting, what Fried may identify as 'opticality.' This is only an assertion but it is simply a demonstration of how painting
points beyond itself in meaning perhaps. The critic Rosalind Krauss identifies how Greenberg and Fried's notion of 'flatness' and 'opticality' actually created a plane of viewing or an axis between the painting and viewer; a kind of three-dimensionality of viewing. She writes in 'A Voyage on the North Sea' that 'no sooner had Greenberg seemed to isolate the essence of painting in flatness than he swung the axis of the field ninety degrees to the actual picture surface to place all the import of painting on the vector that connects viewer and object... the projective resonance of the optical field itself.' When we view a painting we are standing in front of a fixed canvas or board on a wall. The canvas is fixed vertically while we view horizontally. Any meaning we get from the painting is from viewing it on this horizontal content plane and although the meaning is never fixed the painting is fixed. What we have failed to realise in painting is that it is simply a two-dimensional fixed expression plane which offers a meaning of a fixed autonomous moment. So far in this essay I have written about the space or plane of painting and its meanings like writing about the space or plane of this page. A painting is simply a plane of activity and once complete offers a meaning of when that activity ended. This page is simply evidence of a process of typing. What we have failed to recognise is that painting also has a time as well as a space- it is a framed arena for activity, for a process of painting. When we view a painting we only see the end result of a process. 'Flatness' has meaning within a time frame as well as a plane frame...
Painting as an Activity: the Transforming Sign and Play An apple fell off a ladder and flew into a man's mouth. A sign is never fixed. There is a constant play of signifiers and meanings within a painting. A painting is like an 'arena' or a flat plane of signs or half-signifiers or no signifiers at all. A painting is an evidence of activity. However, we must understand the process of activity in which these signifiers come into play or are in play. A painting is only ever the final moment of a process; an activity. When we view a painting we are seeing the product of an activity in which the painter decided to end. Perhaps the painter could have continued painting, but instead the painter made a decision to end the process at that point. The painting thus marks the end of this process and remains at this point of departure, this autonomous moment. Moment. Of course knowing when to end something is perhaps the hardest thing of all, like knowing when to stop writing, whether the sentence is dragging on too long and at what point we should decide to end the process of writing, to close off the sentence, perhaps it should have been done before so I better close it off now. Painting also has this problem. When painting something myself, the greatest problem is always knowing when to stop. Maybe the painting looked best half an hour ago. Guston says that 'the most relevant question is, 'When are you finished?' When do you stop? Or rather, why stop at all? But you have to rest somewhere.' I'll rest here for a moment... What this shows is that the flat plane of painting was once an arena of activity but that activity came to rest. Jackson Pollock is perhaps the quintessential painter for showing us that painting really is an arena of activity. The photos of Hans Namuth are testament to Pollock's working process. We see Pollock stretched over canvases on the floor, flicking liquid paint onto the surface and moving around. In an interview Pollock reflects on this process; 'Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint... I'm able to be freer and to have greater freedom
and move about the canvas, with greater ease.' There is this feeling of movement during the process of painting and yet a finished Pollock painting is static. Harold Rosenberg, in a different respect to Greenberg, considered Pollock and the New York School in terms of 'action.' In 1952 he wrote 'The American Action Painters.' Unlike Greenberg the emphasis of painting is not on 'flatness' but on 'activity.' He writes that 'the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act... What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event' and 'the painting itself is a Hans Namuth photography depicting Pollock at work 'moment' in the adulterated mixture of his life.' If we use Krauss' terminology perhaps what is happening is instead we are focusing not on the vertical plane of the canvas but on the activity of the painter horizontally. Indeed Krauss writes in 'The Crisis of the Easel Picture' that this 'allows for the axis of instinctual behaviour- a horizontal axis- to preside over the body.' The shift is from the canvas to the activity or behaviour of the artist. Even after Pollock art history serves to illustrate this point. There were the 'Happenings' of Allan Kaprow. There were the paintings made by Yves Klein using the female body. Richard Serra had a verb list for creating work. Even Warhol understood the importance of activity. Krauss writes that 'For Warhol... the testimony of the liquid puddles and stains on Pollock's canvases (combined of course with the commentary of Hans Namuth's photographs) renders surfaces horizontal... redoubling the implications of Pollock's process as choreographic.' Thus, all go to show that the artistic work is a residue, an evidence of activity. For me the most important moment in the history of modern painting was not the fact that Pollock exhibited his vast canvases of drips and marks but the fact that Hans Namuth
developed photographs of Pollock's activity. It completely opened painting up and revealed it as having a process, a time, not just a fixed space. Painting was an 'arena' not simply a 'flat plane'. The photos showed that painting has a time, a narrative where marks, signs, gestures are evidence of activity and 'play.' If we return to the notion of sign systems we can better understand this notion of 'activity'. The sign system of Saussure is perhaps too arbitrary Richard Serra action in the studio in fixing a signifier with a signified. Signs are never fixed, they are constantly moving and a sign system needs to account for the contingency of sign connexions. C.S. Pierce developed a far more complicated sign system. Pierce identifies many signs covering many signifiers, but what is most interesting is Pierce's concepts of the 'icon' and the 'index.' As Barry writes 'the icon refers to the signified by resemblance and is best exemplified by a painted portrait... connects the iconic signifier with the person so signified.' Again this could be like Magritte's realistically painted pipe resembling an actual pipe. 'The index', as Barry writes, 'refers to its signified as effect to cause and is best represented by wet streets, which call our attention to the rain that probably caused the wetness.' This is like a Pollock painting; we are viewing the effect of his activity on the canvas. Thus it could be argued that the marks, gestures and signifiers in a Pollock painting are indices. A mark of a brush or of paint is a trace, an index. Rosalind Krauss has adopted Pierce's semiotics in an attempt to redefine painting as an activity. She writes that 'matter will settle onto that field as the residue of an event; the residue itself taking the form of an index or trace, the physical clue to its having happened.' So if we are talking of a vertical 'expression plane' with matter and form then this itself (with its marks, residues and gestures) are indices or traces of activity itself. When Guston paints we have the index or trace of him physically applying the paint and also the icon of what he is painting- that the form resembles a Jackson Pollock. ‘Matter will settle onto the field’ head. However, it is important to realise that
since a painting is an arena of indices these indices are in constant play and the icons or signs and signifiers of a painting are subject to transformation and 'play'. 'Play' for me is an important and fundamental aspect to the activity of art and specifically painting. It surely cannot be argued that when moving paint on a canvas or manipulating a photo on a computer or editing a film there is an element of 'play' occurring. Indeed Namuth's photographs are testimony to Pollock's 'playing' with paint. The Philosopher Immanuel Kant is perhaps most famous for introducing the concept of 'play' to art and aesthetics in general. Kant maintained in his 'Critique of Judgment' that art and aesthetics involved a kind of 'free-play of the imagination and the understanding.' In 'The Origin of a Work of Art' Martin Heidegger claims that a 'work, by being a work, makes space for that spaciousness... The work as work sets up the world. The work holds open the Open of the world' and 'the setting up of the world and setting forth of the earth are two essential features in the work-being of the work... the opposition of the world and earth is a striving.' This binary opposition of world and earth is perhaps like the opposition of the imagination and the understanding. There is a striving, a play, between these oppositions in the activity of the work which allows the work to Open out and point beyond its frame, perhaps. Matter and form, icon and index are perhaps also in a similar 'play' or 'striving'. The idea of 'play' can also be found in the philosophy of Fredrich Nietzsche. In 'Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense' he writes that truth is a 'movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthomorphoisms... the drive towards the formation of metaphors is a fundamentally human drive... It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds it in myth and art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors and metonymies... to refashion the world.' Perhaps this refashioning of metaphors or the world is in 'free-play', a 'free-play drive' or an intuition as Kant might argue. It could be argued that the activity and processes of painting, and indeed writing, is a constant play or drive of refashioning metaphors, signs, icons and indices, opening up the work from the earth to the world, from the vertical to the horizontal axis, from painting to viewer... pointing beyond the frame. (Maybe here I have tried too hard in trying to fit together varying philosophies. Yet, surely trying to muddle these philosophers and semioticians together is an act of 'play' itself. Whether or not I am correct in utilizing these theories in one large paragraph, it surely cannot be argued that a 'refashioning', a 'striving' or a 'playing' is taking place.) Painting then is very simply a striving, a play of many different kinds of signifiers or signs. The fact a 'play' is taking place means that these signs are in constant refashioning or flux. A sign is never fixed. In painting there is interplay of signs, signifiers, gestures and marks. When the painting is deemed finished these signs come to rest, but are not fixed. During the activity of painting there is a process where these signs in interplay are in a state of chaos, like trying to fashion the beginning of an essay. Yet out of this chaotic play emerges some order, some fixed moment that the painter deems to be the finished painting. From chaos to creation...
Chaos to Creation The board is nailed to the wall- a base colour is laid- the artist thinks- a brush is chosen- a mark is made- it is long- another mark is made- it looks like a nose- another mark is made- now it looks like a tree... Painting is an activity; it has a process, a time. It is a chaotic process, a striving of creating marks, gestures and signs. From chaos there emerges creation, and yet when we view a painting we are only seeing the end of this process. Like the creation of the world; there is a whole organic messy process and we are only seeing the moment 'now.' The universe began in chaos and order emerged, yet the universe is still apparently expanding in constant flux. John H. Holland writes in 'Emergence- from Chaos to Order' that a 'wondrous vine emerges when Jack plants the seed for his beanstalk, and it unfolds into a world of giants and magic harps... Now that we're grown, seeds still fascinate us... They are the very embodiment of emergence... recognizable features exist, as in pointillist painting... the systems are animated, dynamic; they change over time...' Chaos theory seems an appropriate way of understanding the creative process. When painting or writing or just about anything, the creative process is not necessarily linear; forms emerge from matter, systems emerge from signs in chaotic flux and transformation. Of course we could paint by numbers but even then something might occur in the process- an accident, a slip, a different kind of mark, a teuhsjhphg- which might interrupt- what?- interrupt and change the activity. Perhaps it involves chance, randomization or perhaps there is some conscious determination but the creative process is not simple and we should account for this in the activity or the 'arena' of painting. There is 'play' taking place from chaos to creation. Marion Milner in 'On Not Being Able to Paint' considers the nature of the creative process by at first attempting to paint and then turning to 'free drawing'. Milner writes 'it was often possible to make drawings by the free method, even without the stimulus of strong conscious feeling about some external object. It was enough to sit down and begin to scribble and the scribble would gradually become a drawing of something. It was usually something rather phantastic, but not always; sometimes it was a single object, sometimes a dramatic scene, sometimes a surrealist conglomeration of bits. Occasionally it would remain just a scribble.' Milner here is attempting to discover the creative process in which order can arrive out of a seemingly chaotic striving or play of activity- whether painting, drawing or scribbling. She writes a note about how a striving to draw something arrived at something entirely unexpected: 'I'll have a large sheet of paper and charcoal, yes, it makes a good thick line... now...that's only a scribble, what's the good in that? It looks like a snake, now it's a serpent coiled around a tree, yes, like the serpent in the garden of Eden, but I don't want to draw that, oh, it's turning into a head, goodness, what a horrid creature.' She writes that 'this book turned out to be an attempt to discover, within the limits of a special field, something of the nature of the forces that bring order out of chaos.' Even Guston acknowledges the striving of free drawing when he says; 'The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers.' He also writes that 'what is seen and called the picture is what remains- an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.' William Kentridge, a South African artist, is particularly interested in drawing as a process of locating, suggesting and discovering. He says; 'What does it mean to say that something is a drawing- as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such
as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you're going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph.' For me the activity of painting and drawing are fundamentally human processes of striving, locating or discovering and playing with signs, marks and gestures to emerge from chaos to order. Of course, such notions of free-play, free drawing, or the automatic, intuitive nature of the process of painting and drawing are not new ideas. The Surrealists were perhaps the first to engage with these notions. Whether or not the processes of drawing and painting involve conscious or sub-conscious decision making, the surrealists were perhaps the first to identify the free playing nature of art. Even with language they sought the accidental and the unknown. They literally played surreal language games such as the 'Exquisite Corpse', a game about the dissociation of signifiers or oxymoron. For example, if someone said 'iron' another would have to say something entirely unrelated, like a 'banana', but even then there might be some unknown association. Apple-mackerel-ladder-steam-leg-dinosaur. Andre Breton, one of the founders of surrealism, in an essay called 'The Automatic Message' writes that we 'must make a precise distinction between 'automatic' writing and drawing, as the word is understood in surrealism...these latter, at least those who have remarkable gifts, trace the letters and lines in a completely mechanical way. They are not totally ignorant of what they write or draw, and their hand, anesthetised, behaves as if it were guided by another hand... whose meaning will not become evident to them until later.' Max Ernst frottage Surrealism itself was defined by Breton as 'psychic automatism' allowing art to be created by the unknown forces of the automatic, the random and the psychic. A work of art comes into being and into the Open of the world via the chaotic, random processes of automatism and the subconscious and often the signifiers that came into being had psychological, Freudian associations. Max Ernst is perhaps one of the most famous Surrealists for employing chance and the automatic in creating paintings. In his essay 'Inspiration to Order' he describes his discovery of such processes; 'It all started on August 10, 1925, by my recalling an incident of my childhood when the sight of an imitation mahogany panel opposite my bed had induced one of those dreams between sleeping and waking. And happening to be at a seaside inn in wet weather I was struck
by the way the floor, its grain accentuated by many scrubbings, obsessed my nervously excited gaze. So I decided to explore the symbolism of the obsession, and to encourage my powers of meditation and hallucination. I took a series of drawings from the floorboards by dropping pieces of paper on them at random and then rubbing the paper with black-lead. As I looked carefully at the drawings that I got in this way- some dark, others smudgily dim- I was surprised by the sudden heightening of my visionary powers,
Max Ernst frottage
Max Ernst grattage
and by the dreamlike succession of contradictory images... I saw human heads, many different beasts...rocks, sea and rain, earth tremors, the sphinx in its stable...' Ernst here like Milner, Guston and Kentridge reveals the activity of creating order from chaos or randomization. His frottages (scrubbings) and grattages (scraping away painting) were processes of 'play' of allowing particular signifiers or symbols to be formed by its index. Scrubbing at floorboards allowed certain forms and signs to emerge in free-play in the same way that marks and gestures
located by the act of drawing or painting might open a space for meaning and sign formation. A recent publication 'You'll Never Know: Drawing and Random Interference' is still evidence that even today artists are still considering the random, chance and chaos and their implications in artistic activity. In this book is an essay written by Sally O'Reilly called 'From Chaos to Order and Back Again.' She writes that 'chance and control need not be antagonistic. The drip of paint can live happily next to the neat border... From the Renaissance onwards controlling devices, such as perspective, were formulated to push the painted image closer and closer to an illusion of reality. There were incidents along the way, however, that proved in retrospect to short-circuit reason and create innovative breakthroughs- they were serendipitous moments when chaos encroached onto order, whether by accident or incident... A painting or sculpture, although motionless is not inert. It can serve as evidence of an action; we can empathize with how it was made and imagine the narrative of its materialisation.' The book cites artists such as Rebecca Horn with her 'Pencil Mask' (1972), Richard Long's splashings of mud (2005), Tim Knowles 'Tree Drawing' (2005) and Keith Tyson's artmachine. In considering artistic practice, especially painting and drawing, we must consider the processes of creative activity in forming and transforming signs from chaos to order. As soon as a mark is made on a canvas it can become Rebecca Horn ‘Pencil Mask’ 1972 something else, it is left open to chaos and infinite possibilities of sign-forming. A sentence can quickly become a moving horse tractor. As James Flint writes; 'Everything is random, everything is preordained: both expressions are equally meaningless. On the sub-atomic level, the universe glows and pulses in giant knots and fields, behaving in ways that stretch our fancy ape brains to the limit. On the super atomic level, the level on which we live and operate, the universe is full of causal chains. Over some of these chains we have approximate and limited control... Chance occurs when a number of these chains, hitherto more or less discrete, collide in a way that we in some way regard as meaningful.' Perhaps with the notion of causal chains, of chaos and creation, of activity and process we can consider painting has having a time and to consider painting across media, beyond its frame and into photography/film/animation...
Painting in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition A problem I have always had with painting is that a painting never exists simply as a painting. A painting can be photographed. A painting can be filmed. I have never actually seen the painting 'Guernica' by Picasso, I have only ever seen its copy. I have painted a copy of Marcel Duchamp's urinal using a copy of a photograph found in a book as reference. There seem too many levels and meta-levels of appropriation. A painting can be physically lost forever but still be found as an image in a book, on a screen or on the internet. A painting has a life beyond its physical frame. Picasso’s Guernica in a book It is important to realize that art is in the age of the post-medium condition, as Krauss would define. Paintings can be reproduced, copied and can become what Fredric Jameson has described as 'simulacrum.' It is a condition of post-modernity. We are constantly in contact with the manufactured reproduction. The original, perhaps, is no longer necessary. It could be suggested that this as consequence destroys the 'aura' or authenticity of the art object; we live in age of mechanical reproduction as Walter Benjamin might argue. The aura or physical presence of the painting becomes lost in its copy. As Jean Baudrilliard writes the copy becomes like the 'evil demon of images', like the copy of an event such as the film 'Apocalypse Now' which becomes more real than the war it actually depicts. We learn about the news of the world not from firsthand experience but from the images that are sent to our screens in our living rooms. Everything seems to be appropriated and we live in an age of the image and of the screen. Of course what is special about painting is that it is in some ways a unique object. As Guston says; painting is 'the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart, maybe.' I Duchamp’s Urinal by R Soul think this will always hold true and to say painting is
dead is ridiculous when people still practice it. Painting is a very human activity and whether a painting is copied or not it still remains as evidence of that human activity. The indices or marks made by the painter are simply copied; they perhaps become 'indexical simulacrum.' Again a quote by Pollock can illustrate this point. He says; 'My opinion is that new needs need new techniques... It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture... Each finds its own technique... The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and the photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world- in other words- expressing the energy, motion, and other inner forces.' Pollock may have been discussing something very different but it is possible that from this quote we can align the painter with this mechanical age. A painting can point beyond its frame into different techniques, mechanisms or media. For Greenberg painting was an independent medium. Painting was 'medium-specific.' A painting was not the same as sculpture, or drawing, or photography or film; it was its own unique thing. Yet, as I have discussed above painting can exist beyond itself in different media. 'Media' is an important word here as it makes a distinction from 'medium.' Krauss writes that the 'postmedium condition- the exploded concept of the medium is simply folded into the fact of media, which is to say the complex vehicles of broadcast, communications, and information technology. The result of this semantic slippage between medium and media is that the loss of specificity is presented as a natural outcome...' In a 'Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post- Medium Condition' Krauss makes the claim that artists since the rise of Minimalism have rejected Greenbergian notions of 'mediumspecificity' and purity and have moved into 'media'. She writes that the 'specific mediums- painting, sculpture, drawing- had vested their claims in purity to being autonomous... they were necessarily disengaged from everything outside their frames.' Krauss identifies the move away from this doctrine of medium specificity to a more William Kentridge exhibition expanded understanding of art, one which breaks with the frame. Already we have discussed how 'opticality' or the 'projective resonance' of painting creates a horizontal vector between painting and viewer. Painting is constantly pointing beyond its frame, especially as something which is evidence pointing to a time of activity. The philosopher Jacques Derrida considers the 'frame' in his 'The Truth in Painting.' He writes concerning the 'parergon'; that often the frame of a theory, the edge of the theory can become the theory itself. So, maybe, whatever is written in brackets in this essay or at the footnote can become more important than the actual main body of text itself... (or perhaps the way in which I am performing this text in places can illustrate my point far more clearly than the
actual meanings of the words.) The binary oppositions of (inside)/ outside have been deconstructed or dismantled. Outside. (Inside). Outside. In the same way a painting can be a painting beyond or outside of its frame. Like I have mentioned a painting can be seen in a film, though that painting in the film is actually a photograph of a painting in a book. That is why I have not simply written an essay, I have also made films which refer beyond themselves and to each other and to this essay... levels and meta-levels, frames and meta-frames of appropriation. A frame- within a frame- within a frame- within a frame. There is no inside or outside. There is no medium. The categories are blurred. In the same way a painting, like a text, points beyond its frame. Derrida writes that 'in marking generically, a text unmarks itself.' In the same way as soon as a mark, an index, is made on a canvas the canvas unmarks itself, or more specifically it points outside and beyond itself to whatever made the mark. A painting, as I have argued, is evidence of activity and this necessarily deconstructs whatever we view on the flatness of the painting surface. A painting is constantly pointing beyond itself and a painting can be viewed and considered across media.
Painting Frames: Painting and Animation Painting is an activity- chaos to creation- emergence of signs- frames of activity- narration. By considering painting as having a time as well as a space perhaps painting can go beyond its frame into the frames of animation, and into the realms of media. A 'paintinganimation' can perhaps open up the process and time of a painting. A frame in an animation becomes a moment of time in the activity of painting. One mark is made- this becomes the first frame. The animation may fall into chaos- one frame is scrubbed out- another emerges into order. The painting is no longer fixed it is literally in motion and in transformative flux. A moment in a painting can be photographed and thus becomes a filmic still. The filmic still is then placed in a sequence and this sequence becomes the animation- the film itself. 'Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image' considers the relationship between the still and moving image. Jonathan Friday in his essay quotes Theodore Roethke who stated; 'stillness becoming alive, yet still.' Friday writes that 'what is depicted in a photograph is not capable of movement within the Edward Muybridge’s famous horses picture-frame: it is a still image in contrast to cinema's capacity to depict objects in movement relative to each other and the frame enclosing them.' Thus movement or animation is only illusionary due to a sequencing of frames and moments; causal chains. A painting is inert, as is the photograph of it, yet a series of photographs of the activity or moments of the painting can become animation. A moment of a painting process can thus become a filmic frame. As Milner writes in 'On not Being Able to Paint': 'Frames can be thought of both in time as well as in space, and in other activities besides painting.'
The dialectic between painting and photography has been around a long time, and although we may consider painting to be at odds with photography, it is not. The earliest forms of photography used painting in the process. For example, in around 1800 Dr William Lewis painted designs onto 'semi porous white surfaces' using silver nitrate, and from direct sunlight images were formed. Thomas Wedgewood around the same time 'painted images on glass, after which he attempted Diorama cinema 1820s to transfer the imageagain through the use of sunlight and silver saltsonto white surfaces.' In the 1820s there was great interest in an invention called the Diorama. The Diorama was used for public entertainment and involved light shining through painted gauzes to create illusory scenes on wall, like an early projection model. Diorama thus used paintings in a combination with light and photographic techniques to create a kind of early cinema. It is interesting that Greenberg and Fried talked about the 'projective resonance' of painting when, literally, the earliest cinema was exactly that. The earliest forms of animation, similarly used paint in its process. In 1826 a toy called the Thaumatrope was available. This was a 'disc with strings twirling it. One half might carry a picture of a bird-cage, the other a bird upside down. If you twirled the disc slowly, the bird was outside the cage, if fast enough, it seemed to be inside.' There were even rotating cake tins called zootropes with painted image-frames inside, so that when the zootrope rotated the images appeared to be in motion. Thus, the notion of an alliance between painting and animation has always been around. Again we can return to Pollock. Hans Namuth's photographs captured frames of activity and Pollock even painted onto glass. Pollock's paintings were even x-rayed in an attempt to discover layers or frames of his painting process. James Coddington in 'No Chaos Damn It' writes that 'examination (of Pollock's paintings) has included x-radiographs and both infrared and ultraviolet light, as well as technical analysis of media and pigments. Although it is difficult and sometimes, impossible, of course, to deconstruct the layers of the paintings, systematically close examination gives us the chance to try to place Pollock's painting decisions within a pictorial logic.' The x-ray is, in some ways, like a photograph trying to deconstruct frames of activity. The x-ray, like the photographic still in a sequence of an animation, is a way of getting to the heart of activity like reaching into the workings of the universe. Linda Darlrymple Henderson's essay 'X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists' lays testament to this notion of the x-ray, that in some respects the x-ray was a
look into 'the fourth dimension', a higher reality. For me, animation, like the x-ray, is a way of revealing the hidden process behind a painting, the layers and frames of a painting- reaching into its heart. Today, 'painting-animations' seem like a relatively unexplored yet exciting new area of artistic practice. Jacco Oliver has recently exhibited painting animations at the Victora Miro gallery in London and are described as being a cross between painting and the moving image. Caroline Leaf is an animator who used a combination of paint and sand on glass. In Leeds City Art Gallery I got the chance to see a viewing of animated films by Jeff Scher and Robert Breer. Breer himself was experimenting with painting-drawing animations as early as 1957. Jeff Scher's 'Garden of Regrets' (1994) is an 8 minute animated montage of over ten thousand paintings. There always seems to be some wally who claims that painting is dead. A 'paintinganimation' is a way of opening up the process of painting and declaring that painting is still alive, it is moving, and it is essentially an activity of a human being with hands, brains, imagination and heart maybe. The activity of painting involves a play of forms, gestures, marks and signs that emerge from a state of chaos to transform into some kind of order, like a phoenix rising from the fire. This leads to the final frame of this essay...
Painting and 'Painting-Animations' as a form of Alchemy Alchemy, simply, is understood as a process of turning base substances, like lead or primal matter, into something more or higher, like gold or the philosopher's stone. However, alchemy has also been a hermetic spiritual tradition, which concerns itself with a kind of first psychological system of signs which are in a state of transformation. As well as a physical
From Chris Soul, Metamorphosis, the Creation, Painting-Animation
process, alchemy was a process of transforming or transmuting the spirit into something higher. Urszula Szulakowska, a lecturer at Leeds, has written about the tradition of alchemy as having an influence on artistic practice. Alchemy has a history going back to the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus and to sixteenth and seventeenth century hermeticist engravings by the likes of Heinrich Khunrath and Robert Fludd. The esoteric signifiers and symbols depicted in these engravings represent a kind of spiritual process of transformation. Alchemy has been used as a metaphor for artistic practice by many modernist and postmodernist artists. Yet, as Szulakowska has written 'it is necessary to observe, however, that the concept of 'alchemy' in twentieth century modernism has only a metaphorical relation to the corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth century...the majority of modernist artists who claim an 'alchemical' context for their art do not, in fact, use any alchemical signifiers, merely the concept of transmutation itself. For example, Paul Klee referred to himself as an 'alchemist' without ever directly referencing any authentic texts or imagery. Another case is Jackson Pollock.... As a metaphor, 'alchemy' refers to an artist's seemingly magical ability to transform banal subject-matter with the aid of (often shoddy) materials into that complex and hugely expensive artefact termed 'art.'' Thus, it could be argued, that the play of a painting is like an alchemical process of transmutation or transformation. It is a process of transforming the banal primal matter of paint into something higher and more... from chaos to creation; the phoenix rising from the fire. Thus the process and activity of painting can be associated metaphorically with the Alchemical engravings by Robert Fludd 16th century processes and transformations inherent in the tradition of alchemy; something perhaps as magical. George Ripley in his 'Compound of Alchymy' in 1471 describes the stages of the alchemical process, and maybe these stages can be related to the stages in the process of creating a painting to a projected painting-animation. The first stage is called 'Calcination' and involves the 'reduction of a substance to an ashy powder through intense heat.' It is like the powder that makes the paint pigment or very simply the paint itself in its basic form. Another stage is called 'Sublimation' which is a distillation process, an 'elevation' or 'exaltation' of materials. This is like the signs or signifiers that are formed by the paint, its content, which is like the transcendence of the artwork. It has meaning beyond its materiality. The stage after this is 'Multiplication' involving the potency of the powder, the philosopher's stone itself- the finished painting perhaps. Or perhaps 'Multiplication' can be viewed as the potency of the 'painting-animation' with its multiple frames. The animation itself is like the philosopher's stone (or philosopher's disc.) Interesting the last alchemical stage is called 'Projection.'
Athanasius Kircher projected slides 1646
The earliest forms of photography and projection can be viewed alchemically. Projection was first described by in 1646. It used, like the Diorama, painted glass slides with light shining through to create projected images on walls. These images were of demons, devils and skeletons. The so-called 'magic lantern' in the 1800s was a similar projection device and 'during the eighteenth century the lantern thus had a popular sideshow vogue as a device for producing phantasmagoria.' Laurie Dahlberg in 'The Material Ethereal: Photography and the Alchemical Ancestor' considers the connection between the processes of photography and the processes of alchemy. She writes that 'When it appeared before the public in 1839, courtesy of Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre...photography struck observers as a radically new technology that conjoined art and science through means that were seemingly magical.' The early photograph was seen as a 'product that transcended its ordinary physical ingredients: an image so powerfully real that nineteenth century observers often grappled with the idea of the dagurreotype image as somehow alive in a state of suspended animation.' Thus, even photography and projection can be linked to the concept of alchemy; the seemingly magical production from base substances. Perhaps a projected 'painting-animation' is like the philosopher's stone, a magical final stage, of revealing the alchemical process of painting. A mark is made from the primal matter, the paint, and this becomes something more, a sign, and through a process of multiplication of marks we have a painting which means and points beyond itself and becomes a projection, either the 'projective resonance' of a painting itself or the projection of a 'painting-animation.' From the chaotic ashes of paint arises the meaningful phoenix fluttering against the wall; the philosopher's stone. Even Creation itself, the creation of the universe, was viewed as an
alchemical process arising from a first state of chaos. However, even though we may use alchemy as a metaphor for the process of painting and painting-animations, for me it is also important to recognise the signifiers inherent in the images of alchemy. I have explored the idea of 'free-drawing' or 'free-painting' like Milner, whereby signifiers can reveal themselves through the chaotic play and progression of the act of painting and drawing. This has already been discussed in this essay. However, the signifiers that emerge from this process are not always clear. As Milner writes the images or forms created can sometimes be meaningful or meaningless. In painting I realized that signifiers emerge haphazardly, randomly and chaotically. I paint a line, it becomes a tree- what is this tree? The tree of life? Questions about what these images were led me to consider the signifiers that emerged through the chaotic play of painting and drawing as having psychological, historical or mythological significance. Whether or not it comes from the subconscious or some magical place in the imagination is beside the point. A sign when revealed points to something with significance. I realized I started painting moons, suns, trees, mountains, snakes and strange bird like creatures. It was only until I looked at the signifiers inherent in alchemical engravings and myth generally that I realised that these images I had created were in some ways universal, or simply that they had a history. So, ironically, the alchemical process or activity of painting had flung up unsuspecting alchemical images. Artists such as Leonara Carrington, Rebecca Horn, Yves Klien, Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer have used alchemical signifiers to describe their sexual, psychological or national identities. Carl Jung was the first to identify the signifiers in alchemy as having psychological significance. He called mythological or alchemical signifiers as archetypes; they are primordial ideas, common to all mankind. The process of alchemy he considered to be a process that was also psychological or spiritual. From chaos to creation, depression to realization, the joining of male and female, the sun and the moon, death and rebirth- the phoenix and Christ. Jung writes in the 'Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy' that 'myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery... in nature the opposites seek one another... as soon as the unconscious begins to manifest itself they split asunder, as at the Creation; for every act of dawning consciousness is a creative act, and it is from this psychological experience that our cosmogonist symbols are derived.' Perhaps in the act and creation of painting something like this occurs, and maybe the symbols developed are archetypes common to a kind of collective consciousness of human history. Paint- a line- a curve- the moon- the feminine? As soon as a mark is made it negates itself, it splits usunder, as Derrida says it 'unmarks itself' and becomes something else, and perhaps this something else is an archetypal image, a mythological image common to us all. Or perhaps it is just simply a way of freeing our imagination and Opening up a world from the earth, the primal matter and letting us 'play' as artists.
Conclusion This essay and its associated DVD have attempted to reconsider the autonomy of the medium of painting. It has attempted to consider painting beyond its frame, to consider painting as being an activity and thus having a time as well as a space. Painting can become an animation, revealing the processes and transformations inherent in the activity of painting itself as well as revealing the signs, marks, gestures, indices and archetypes that are formed during that process. Painting and painting-animation-projections can be viewed metaphorically as being an alchemical process containing perhaps alchemical spiritual or psychological significance. This essay has covered a broad selection of subjects to reconsider painting. There are so many places where painting has been and so many places where painting can go that it is almost impossible to include everything. Like the start of this essay I am not certain of where to begin the end... maybe I already have. Maybe I'll just collapse now, like words collapsinginonthemselves...the phoenix returns to the fire to be reborn again... the snake eats his own tail... an egg?
Painting from Chris Soul, Metamorphosis: The Creation, Painting-Animation
By Chris Soul