Paul Winstanley, Art School

Art  School

Paul Winstanley

Art School Paul Winstanley

Art  School Paul Winstanley Essay by Jon Thompson Interview by Maria Fusco

Ridinghouse

Aberdeen Aberystwyth Bath Birmingham Brighton Bristol Canterbury Cardiff Carlisle Chichester Coventry Derby Dundee Edinburgh Falmouth Farnham Glasgow Gloucester Hatfield Huddersfield Hull Ipswich Lancaster Leeds Leicester Liverpool London; Central Saint Martins London; Chelsea London; East London London; Goldsmiths London; Kingston London; Middlesex London; Slade London; Westminster London; Wimbledon Loughborough Manchester Middlesbrough Newcastle Newport Northampton Norwich Nottingham Oxford Plymouth Preston Reading Sheffield Southampton Stoke-on-Trent Sunderland Swansea Winchester Wolverhampton Wrexham

Paul Winstanley Art School

All photographs were taken by the artist during the summers of 2011 and 2012. They show studios used by undergraduate Fine Art students in each of the art schools and art departments listed at the start of the book. The studios were photographed exactly as found with nothing touched or moved.

The images follow the same running order as the list at the front of the book. Some institutions have six or seven images included, others one or two. technical information All photographs were taken at f2.8 stop with a Canon 5d Mark 2 camera and 24-70 mm lens using only natural light where possible. about the artist Paul Winstanley studied at Lanchester Polytechnic – now Coventry University – Cardiff College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Through the 1980s and 1990s he taught part time at Falmouth School of Art and then at Goldsmiths College, London and has visited and lectured at many others.

Winstanley has been exhibiting since the late 1970s and over the past two decades he has had regular solo exhibitions in London, Dublin, Paris, Hamburg, Los Angeles and New York. His paintings have been included in group exhibitions worldwide and can be found in numerous private and public collections. Further details can be found at www.paulwinstanley.com

A Single Huge Art School Paul Winstanley in conversation with Maria Fusco

maria fusco: When and how did Art School start? paul winstanley: The genesis of the project was quite a long time ago. Back in the 1990s, when I was last teaching, I was working on paintings of particular interiors – TV rooms, lounges, waiting rooms – which were institutional in nature. The environments I was living in, working in, passing through were of constant interest, so inevitably, working in the art school, I was very conscious of the studio spaces, lecture theatres and seminar rooms that people were working in, that I was working in, that the students were working in. I did consider these as possible subject matter for some work at the time though I felt this would be slightly to one side of what I was involved in. mf: Did you think the art school interiors performed a different function to the institutional ones? pw: My thinking was that they would not have been sufficiently centred on the idea of the institution and the viewers’ relation to that. Focusing on art school interiors would have seemed to shift my interests away from the social values of these more generic institutional spaces – with the focus on cultural recognition and the passage of time – towards something narrower and more deterministic. It could easily have come to be merely about the art school as subject rather than the relationship between the viewer and the subject. I needed to keep that relationship where it was: open and fluid.

About ten years later – after I stopped teaching in fact – I returned to these ideas and began to think not just of art school studios as they were being worked in, but about the studios as empty spaces, as empty potential. This was the difference from my earlier thoughts on this subject. The introduction of this emptiness allows for a degree of abstraction which presents a different kind of space for the viewer to operate in. That was the germ of the idea for this book, and for the archive of photographs that it’s become. mf: The equivalence of emptiness and potential is an interestingly counterintuitive way to approach production. Is there something about the ‘flatness’ of photography that allows you to access this potential more directly? pw: All the way through I had been thinking about art school studios in terms of finding and developing subject matter for painting, and not as a photographic project in its own right. It was only when I finally decided to do something about it that my ideas about the medium changed.

One summer I visited half a dozen art schools around London, and took some photographs with a not-brilliant camera, just as an experiment to see how they would look, and what I would

feel about it. I was surprised at how the photographs had an authentic documentary feel or aspect to them, something painting can’t have in the same way. Even though they were often photographs of completely empty spaces – or maybe even because they were photographs of such empty spaces – the residue of detail and particularities came to the fore, which made me very conscious of them as documentary images. They seemed to accumulate into something of value. mf: You evoked the word ‘archive’ earlier. That word suggests a body of work that has an eye on being complete, or if not complete at least representative of the whole. pw: Yes, it quickly became apparent if this was going to be a photographic project with a strong documentary element to it, it would have to be very thorough. I would have to visit all the art schools in the UK I could find, within a given time frame, and I would have to approach the project with the eye of a photographer, rather than that of a painter. And, I would need to get a better camera! mf: Logistic problems often suggest creative solutions… pw: Very quickly actually I made decisions about how to photograph these spaces consistently; what my relationship to the studios would be or rather what the camera’s relationship to the studios must be.

Formally, I decided the image would always be vertically oriented – which is perhaps slightly odd for spaces you usually perceive horizontally – to allow the opportunity to take a view, a slice, as it were, through the space which I thought was the more interesting pictorially, making the camera’s framing more explicit. My big rule was not to touch anything, I photographed exactly as I found it, I never moved a chair, or a table: it was simply about the framing. mf: It sounds like there was a tension in the moment of change in form from a painting to a photographic project. Perhaps this tension is analogous to returning oneself to being the ‘amateur’ photographer rather than the ‘professional’ painter? pw: That’s true in terms of my attitude to photography. Although I’ve used photography as an essential starting point in my work for years, I’ve always regarded myself as ‘an amateur’, ‘unprofessional’ photographer. I’ve taken some pretty bad photographs! Yet, amazingly, some good paintings can be made from these – sometimes from a number of photographs. mf: Composite images, is that right? pw: They’re not all composite, but I would say most of my paintings are – edited, altered, layered – I have an idea at the beginning of what I want an image to do, to be. mf: The vertical photographic view, the slice of the art school studios’ horizontal vistas then, denotes this same sense of what you want the image to do. The editing takes place in the shot as it happens, in real time, rather than in advance of the act of painting. pw: My approach to photography has usually been quite informal, in that I’ve used it like clay, a plastic material. When digital photography came along it was an absolute godsend because this plasticity was made real. But in this project that’s not been my approach at all: the photograph taken remains as itself. So the real work was done on site. mf: Do you think art school studios are necessarily less personal than artists’ studios? pw: Yes of course, artists’ studios are very personal spaces, used in as many individual ways as there are artists. The interesting thing about the art school studio is that it subscribes to a certain model and then gets cleaned out once a year – however intimate the use has been during the

academic year – it is cleared and starts again. I photographed it at the point where it’s pretty much been scrubbed clean, this is significant for me because it is the point at which it starts to dissolve back into a kind of pure idea of art school. mf: A pure idea of art school, how can there be such a thing?! pw: Well, that would require a big answer! I think my idea of art school is a personal one – and probably a bit utopian – borne mainly from my experience as a student and also, a little, as a teacher. mf: Where did you study? pw: I did a foundation course at Coventry, then a degree at Cardiff, and then two years at The Slade School of Fine Art. I loved being at art school. I felt I was involved in an education (if education is the right word) or experience, that would simply be unavailable at such an intense, advanced level in any other type of study.

It’s the uniqueness of each student’s educational experience – not tailored exactly – but partly created by the individual for themselves, that’s so valuable. You don’t receive an education, you are as responsible for it as the lecturers or indeed as anybody else. It involves the whole person, the development of critical understanding and the contexts in which you can operate; whether they are critical, social, historical or whatever. And it’s fixed by doing, making and by materiality: the things you make fix the point you’re at. mf: I’m thinking now about the architectural and emotional uniformity of art school studios, their generic quality, the annual clearing-out balanced with their steady hold, their recognisability.

Academic study ought to be an empirically consistent experience for all students – we know this to be unfortunately untrue – so the studio acts as a stand-in maybe for this consistency through its formal, interior architectures. pw: It isn’t a consistent experience, that’s true, because it centres on the people who are there and people are not consistent. That’s why art school education doesn’t fit easily into a straight academic context. Issues like these were partly the motivation for making this project, I felt there was something to be said about art schools and about their success, certainly over the past fifty or sixty years. They have, must have, produced thousands of independent-minded people over this period who have gone on to work in all areas of life and shaped the world we live in. They don’t just train artists! This art school model – devised in the UK in the early 1960s mostly – has become the default model for art school education all over the world. At a very simple level I just wanted to show what that looked like. mf: Non-action. How much is not going on in an art school studio? These photographs are speaking about something that has already happened… pw: …or might be about to happen. mf: Indeed, in that way there’s a peculiar sense of time in these photographs. What tense would you say the photographs are? pw: That’s a very good question. I thought it was important to avoid some kind of nostalgia.

For me, the photographs are in a persistent present tense, what remains kind of exists in an extended moment.

Light and time, elements within the space, and the abstraction of surface and minimalism made concrete in a figurative sense as a photograph or a painting. There’s a process going on which is obviously consistent throughout my entire body of work, and an expression of time underpins all

of that, has always been essential. Possibly the test for this project will be in twenty or thirty years time when it will be apparent whether these images still refer to something people recognise as art schools. What remains of interest in images like these is not always predictable. mf: How much is habit responsible for production, especially in a studio context? pw: In my own experience, even though the studio is essentially a workshop, a lot of time is spent thinking, dreaming of new things, and painting, sitting around, making cups of tea, looking and maybe reading and worrying. Then the doing part could be very brief; it could be very quick.

Or alternatively I could spend all day painting the same small patch. It varies. mf: Velocity and habit, can this be taught? pw: I don’t think so. These are temperamental things. People work in different ways. These art school studios contain, in a sense, an expression of time passing. Maybe this is habit. mf: And how is this time inscribed onto the work? pw: Expression of time is linked for me to surface. The images are very much about surface, the surface of the interiors of these studios. Surface is something that I have always felt a strong need to address: the residual surface, the autonomy of surface. Although surface contains history and narrative it also exists within the present, in the now. mf: So the ‘real-time’ of these photographs is twofold: the actual physical surface on the page of course, but crucially the real time of renewal and usage, the boards, the white screens which cover that which has gone before. pw: There are many photographs here of art schools – nineteenth-century art schools for instance and even some 1960s buildings – where the original interiors have been covered. The boards cover over the architectural details: they cover over doors, they cover over windows and quite often in these photographs you see the original architecture emerging from above the screens. It’s very similar wherever you go, in fact, unless it’s a purpose-built, more contemporary building.

There is this layering going on, a layering of surfaces. There is this kind of junction, if you like, between the social-political content of these photographs and the obsession with the painted, made surface, or the surface of that which represents, or that which is representing. mf: Which leads me to ask you about the lack of a view in art school studios. pw: A view? mf: Yes, a view out of the window, in fact lack or a blocking up of windows generally. pw: This happened a lot. In fact it was a relief when it didn’t and I was really aware of this because I’ve used the window as a motif in my work a great deal. Some studios, on high-up floors that would have had great views out were totally covered over. Personally I’d hate to work in a studio you couldn’t look out of. The most obvious parallel that struck me was of the Las Vegas casinos and their monocultural world where it’s company policy to not allow the customer to look out. mf: Certainly. I can understand, on a logistical level that studio walls are often needed to hang work etc, but I suspect the lack of something to look at (other than what the students are making themselves) is a working methodology, quite precisely imposed… pw: It is a bit weird. It means that students coming into art school studio spaces have to bring everything with them in all senses.

mf: Is that a precondition of going to art school? pw: Maybe the deprivation of views breaks down the over-familiarity people have with their own environment. But often what artists are doing is simply pointing at something in order to say, ‘this is worth looking at’. The looking creates something that wasn’t there before, so the covering of windows feels at least like a symbolic negation of this possibility. mf: Does this visual deprivation need solitude too in order to function properly? When I went to art school I hardly ever saw anybody, I was quite happy. pw: I was pestered all the time, actually! I wanted them to go away sometimes. mf: It’s this peculiar sort of confluence of the private and the non-private space of the art school studio. Often the walls are temporary, flimsy, there is ambient noise, your fellow student is right beside you and you can hear them breathing. pw: Of course you’ve got to be able to work within your own private space in a public arena, which requires a degree of tolerance from everyone. But also, as a student, I remember that the audience for what we were all doing there was mainly each other, other students. So there is always this performative aspect to working in the art school. mf: Do you think these photographs could live outside of a book? pw: In terms of this project, the accumulation of the images, the turning of the pages in the form of a book replaces, in a sense, the distillation you get in a single painting. I have actually finally begun making a series of paintings from this project now that the photographic work is done, but the choice of images is interesting. Most have needed some form of editing, however marginal, to satisfy the painting; some are images drawn from this book but others are from those not included for whatever reason but which nevertheless do something in terms of painting. Only a very small number of these photographic images have been used for painting, or could be used for painting.

It’s a finite resource in those terms.

But in terms of the photographic project, it was important that the photographs remain as taken, and the mass of photographs and the way they all relate to one another do the work. So in that way, these photographs ideally exist as a book project. mf: Does that mean that Art School is innately concerned with plurality rather than singularity? pw: In the photographic project, generally, yes it is, yes. This archive is reflective of experience.

It is not an abstract idea. It comes back to, in the reader/viewer, a recognition that what’s been represented is something that relates to their experience if, you know, they had been an art student before or they had some contact with art education at some point in their lives. I would hope that the rhythm of time evidenced within this project somehow exemplifies an art student’s experience of being in that situation themselves. mf: This sort of sense of plurality interests me because it’s contrary, I think. Is there something about comparisons of things which are similar that interests you? pw: Oh, yes. There’s lots of history involved within that way of working. There’s nothing unique in this. Yes, definitely, a lot of these photographs show very similar interiors but they are also distinct in detailed differences and those details then become absolutely key to the work. Familiarity with the archive – actually looking at the photographs – you do start to pick out more and more differences and patterns.

mf: It’s necessary to look at all of the photographs in order to distinguish between them in the project? pw: I think so. mf: In one sense all of the art colleges are remnants because they can’t be constituted back into a whole, but the similarities between them are so strong: the characteristics both formal and, obviously, in terms of the moment when you have looked at and photographed them. Were there any photographs you thought did not fit in? pw: No, they all fit in by virtue of existing. On one level this is a very democratic project so everything – if it qualifies, could be included – so, by definition, nothing cannot fit in. Having said that, obviously I’ve taken many more photographs than I’ve included in this book. mf: So the reader/viewer learns from the photographs how to read them? Learns how to read through looking at the multiplicity of the images? pw: Exactly. One thing I’m avoiding with this project is to identify which photographs go with which institution. Actually, in terms of the structure of the book, there is an alphabetical list of all the colleges at the beginning, and the photographs follow that order – but some colleges have five or six photographs associated with them and some only one or two, and it’s not indicated which college is which.

I don’t want to be too didactic or determinist, I just want a kind of environment in which you can enter and move around in any direction and in which you can get lost, and in the process become familiar with these images in their own right. Some will have possibly more meaning than others and some will be more interesting, and some will be more banal, and so on – and in that sense the project creates its own rhythms. mf: There are two sets of desires at play here: there’s your desire as the maker of the photograph, to find the right pitch and form, and then there’s also the desire of the viewer/the reader – myself, in this instance of course – to compare the art colleges environments, to ask me to make a decision between the images. This is one of the functions of comparison, isn’t it? pw: I think this sense of desire is a by-product of other kinds of thinking processes – what I allow in, and what I don’t allow in. mf: Each individual art school studio doesn’t determine their own criterion, rather the criteria is redeveloped through the group. pw: It is like it is one big art school. mf: That’s a great idea! pw: All mad crazy, in a single huge art school.

Photography Towards Painting: The Studio as an Allegorical Site in the Photographs of Paul Winstanley Jon Thompson

Looking at a painting by Paul Winstanley it is tempting to believe that we can see through and beyond the painting’s meticulously constructed surface, to the photograph which is its source.

In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Winstanley’s paintings are to the photographic image what a mask is to a face. Inwardly, it fits perfectly – follows the photograph’s topology fairly precisely – outwardly it manifests a different character of presence entirely. It seems that in the process of translation, the subject as it was captured by the eye of the camera has been displaced – its claim to truthfulness dislodged; one type of reality has been superseded by another. Where reality once held sway the miasmic now reigns, and just how this change of state has been contrived is not immediately clear. We are aware of the play of difference – say between the painted and the photographic surface – but the real story that difference tells remains carefully hidden; masked by a beautifully executed – seemingly mimetic – array of detail which shadows, without replicating, the language of the photograph almost exactly.

As paintings, then, these images bring us face-to-face with the historical discourse which adheres to the question of realism, in particular with the part played in its more recent evolution through the use of visualising technologies and most especially by photography.

Photographs – all photographs – start, of course, from the notion that the concrete, visible world is entirely recoverable as image, and as such requires no broadly agreed verification but are justified by their referent alone. For modern painting which deploys photography as part of its method, this has come to represent a crucial point of ontological slippage, between the world as seen – the visible world – and the world as representation, and that multiplicity of potential visual worlds wherein the making of meaning through language is in play. In the case of the pure, photographic image, there is an unavoidable confluence of referent and signifier which ties it absolutely to the visible as its source at the same time as robbing it of other forms of signification beyond that afforded by its factual array. By contrast, where painting as visual language is concerned, ontological ambiguity is inescapable. Here, the signifying point of origin lies not with the referent, but with something occurring between human subjects – the arrival at some common form of vocalisation – an agreement, even if it is an endlessly provisional one – about what is being said and eventually how what is being said is to be understood. It follows that forms of contemporary painting which – like Winstanley’s – appear to stay close to their origin in photography are manifestly hybrid in nature. They hold to the referential illusion of the photograph while at the same time doubling-up as meaningful constructions in painted visual language: simultaneously the mask assumed and the mask denied. It is this duplicity which guarantees their status within the modernist canon.

To understand this in greater depth it is useful to look more closely at the task which has engaged Winstanley’s attention since 2009: his photographic odyssey through the emptied-out studios of Britain’s art schools. It is in these works – photographs as well as paintings – that the dualistic play of mimicry and masking finds a particularly rich and thoroughly engaging form.

At first sight there is a certain blankness to these images. In the case of the photographs especially, this amounts almost to a refusal to refer, or, as far as it is possible, an intention to expel signification from the photographic sign. They seem to function in denial of any very focused reason to exist apart from giving rise to a highly unspecific quality of absence. The viewer is left asking why this image and what exactly is being signified. Of course, for those who have experience of art schools and the cyclical nature of art school life, these images of empty spaces – unpopulated, mostly unfurnished and robbed of any evidence of their usage – are all too familiar. They are easily able to read and fill out these images, assuage the feelings of melancholy they invoke, repopulate them and put the emptiness to flight. They can also recognise another reality existing beyond this architecture of absence and integrate it into their knowledge of both the object and subject of these photographic works. These are images of constructed spaces after all, and as such they are potent representations of a particular functional typology. Most importantly they refer to temporary, fabricated spaces within spaces, in other words images of a pseudo-architecture, designed to hide and effectively neutralise the presence of real architecture. And beyond this again, they are intended to function as a model reference to an ideal architecture, stripped of all historical baggage, cleansed of all structurally superfluous notations. An architecture which opens the door on that most important of all modernist fictions, the idea of an absolute contemporaneity. While real architecture – and in the case of the majority of Britain’s art schools this means nineteenth-century architecture – speaks through a concretised version of a wider and deeper historical discourse, steeped in social purpose, powerfully evolutionary and rich in referential detail, this emptied out model architecture, this pseudo-architecture is conspicuously ahistorical in character. Its version of reality is provisional by its very nature. In this respect, Winstanley’s photographs treat us to a new, post-critical, type of historical objectivity – albeit ironically – which claims its authenticity through self-sufficiency.

Their deep subject is nothing less than the modern condition, revealed in the form of a de-structured no-space in which, what Roland Barthes has described as ‘the-having-been-there’ of things, is sufficient.

As images of emptied-out places of creative work, they speak of a state that is suspended between past and future, between memory and possibility, without showing any clear allegiance to either. They suggest, then, both an amnesiac condition and a myopic one. While the real studio spaces – we might call it a forgotten architecture – were designed to facilitate a collective endeavour with common rules and shared values, these temporary spaces are wed unashamedly to presentness which is, by implication, their subject. They can bear witness only to who and what is present in the present at the moment of address and so predicate that most fundamental of modernist tropes.

Namely that a work of art is the embodiment of individuality. That the modern work of art – to quote a very telling formulation by the art theorist, Thierry de Duve, ‘chooses its viewers one at a time’. 1 Accordingly, such works are not simply the products of the artists bent on manifesting their individuality, but they also function to individuate the collective of viewing subjects. It is this curious half-truth that underpins the present-day tendency to view the aesthetic sphere as culturally autonomous; as a kind of entelechy floating somewhere above and detached from the politics of everyday life. (I say half-truth here because it is inescapably true that the first moment of encounter with a work of art, before, that is, the inrush of learned and shared contextualising knowledge that will eventually determine a more lasting relationship to it, inevitably, is as a lone viewing subject.)

Where galleries and museums are concerned this tendency manifests itself in the ubiquitous bare white walls of contemporary exhibition spaces, the main intention of which is to isolate the viewing experience: an idiom and an attitude which has come to dominate the way that artists and art schools now give shape to their working environments. It was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who first advanced a vision of the modern social world as heading towards a condition of universal placelessness; a world in which the idea of space would supplant the idea of place.

Life would be lived out in an endless continuum of evenly subdivided spatial components. These divisions would need to be set and reset. A boundary would no longer be seen as a limit or the point at which ‘something stops… but as the point from which begins its presencing’. 2

Heidegger’s formulation, while it has not as yet gained a firm foothold in the real social world, outside – that is – of that extreme version of the modern city that Jean Gottman has labeled the megalopolis, might be seen as entirely predictive of present day working life in the studios of Britain’s art schools.3 Viewed in this context, pseudo-architecture might be seen as purposefully modern in its quasi-utopian drift. Certainly it is intended to facilitate presencing in the Heideggerian sense. The presencing of the work of art, certainly, but also of the artist who authors it. But we should be careful not to set aside the element of desocialisation which such a conception implies. After all, Heidegger’s bounded place-form is not conceived as a nomadic site, a temporary location, but as a building, a dwelling place and a place of cultivation: a place in which to be and to be together.

We can see from these few speculations about the reading of Winstanley’s photographs that though seemingly simple in what they represent, their real content exists at a much deeper level.

By doubling the subject, suspending it between what is as seen – present – in the instant that the camera’s shutter closed, and a ghosted array of persons and things which are invisible – no longer or not yet present – he is deliberately problematising the subject, bringing us face-to-face with the question of what is being photographed and why. That these images too, are of a unitised and prefabricated architecture seen as a series of empty encampments, each presented as a form of decor, the purpose of which is to mask off a more concrete, real, preexistent architecture, further complicates this process of doubling. Most importantly, they are a set; they exist as an indeterminate sequence (without any specific order). Indeed, it is Winstanley’s insistence upon this one allegorical device that gives these images their ironic potency and instantiates them as representative of a personalised style. As photographic images they trade on inversion, deploy a demonstrative device which alternates between the absence of presence and the presence of absence. As allegorical signs they dwell upon concrete particulars. In as far as they are more concerned with objective truth than with meaning they draw close to what Theodor Adorno described as ‘exact fantasy’, that is fantasy that ‘abides strictly within the material that the sciences and technologies present to it, and reach beyond them only in the smallest aspects of their arrangement…’. 4

This brings us to an even more compelling question. Why bother to translate these images into painting at all? To answer this we must first consider the way in which film functions as a language by receiving exact copies of things in order to give them a renewed existence as signifiers in a new language system – photography. Because it is animated chiefly by detail it might quite properly be called a mimetic language. Furthermore, it generates allegory by turning concrete images into words.

Its dominant mode of operation, then, is that of a rebus. For this reason it is entirely appropriate, to talk about reading a photograph, a much more problematic term – despite common critical usage – when used to describe the way in which we come to understand a painting.

In fact the idea of reading provides for a crucial point of divergence between the way in which we relate to photographs and the way in which we relate to paintings. In the case of the former the approach must be atomistic and pictogramatic – photographs required to be read – in the case

of the latter, a painting, the approach must be holistic and summative. The task of transposing a photographic image into a painted image, then, reaches far beyond anything that might be described as reproducing or copying. It can only be seen as a full-blown act of translation: a journey, in other words, from one language form into another. More than that, it is a passage from one way of being – an outwardly facing endlessly fragmenting consciousness – into another very different one.

One that is characterised by a longing for unity, figurally speaking, perhaps even for a condition of hypostasis, to borrow a notion from Douglas Crimp. Winstanley’s paintings are a particularly vivid example of this process of translation. At first sight photograph and painting seem to be very close to each other. As we remarked at the beginning of this essay it seemed that the paintings offered an easy passage through to the originating photograph. But the more we examine them the more we become aware of the material nature of the process of translation acting as a barrier. Photographic images, while they have depth of field, have no optical or material thickness. Paintings, by contrast, no matter how finely wrought, have both. Photographs also have detail, usually it comprises nameable features or things. In Winstanley’s images, reflections, light-fittings, bits of plumbing, door handles, window frames and so on. While detail in painting attaches itself to the marks that optically configure objects. For this reason, painted marks exist and move in both space and time which is why their execution necessitates a very particular kind of kinaesthetic awareness as well as real spatial invention. Indeed, it is only in a fully sensed, entirely unified, optical space that painted marks – brushstrokes or painted forms – can find their place, their reason to exist and – most importantly – to coexist. Paint and canvas might be said to constitute the material ‘real’ of the painted image, but it is this other ‘ecto-space’, this optical thickening of the picture plain, which is painting’s true medium. This is the place in which the paintings offer of ‘otherness’ is to be found and why the translation of a photograph into a painting represents a step out of one type of real into another: out of the mimetic ghosted world of the merely visible into the more immediate and illusive flux of the visual.

However in the final analysis, the answer to the question ‘why bother with this act of translation at all’, is as fugitive as the realisation of a painted image. It is, after all, merely a subcategory of the much larger question – post the invention of photography – of ‘why continue to paint things as seen at all’. Certainly, painting is a stunningly inefficient method of recording things and events in the real world. The answer, then, can only lie with the substance of paint itself, in other words, with what is fundamentally a material practice, the act of painting itself. Painters watch the emergent evolution of their painted images – the coming into being of their material nature – very closely and they do so from within a curiously hermetic pre and post linguistic space. They describe things to themselves as they work, but they are also critically aware of the inadequacies of words to capture all of what they see and do. In truth as James Elkins has argued, there is no contemporary language that can adequately convey the intuitions and observations that the painter experiences in the act of painting. 5 While photographs can be read and reread – almost to the point of exhaustion in the context of a post-structuralist discourse – paintings continue to resist the hermeneutic inrush by endlessly renewing themselves as things to be experienced.

In the case of a painter like Winstanley who chooses to keep the painted image deceptively close to the photograph, the evidence of an inner translational monologue is, of necessity, deliberately subdued. It emerges – makes itself apparent – in the finished work only when the painting is put under the closest scrutiny. Only then does the careful layering and modulation of paint that forms what I have called the painting’s ecto-space become apparent. The strategy is to create a certain degree of confusion in the viewer’s mind about how to approach the paintings and how to judge their truth-value. It is for this reason that Winstanley has always resisted the idea of showing the photographs side by side with the paintings, preferring instead to treat photography,

not as a separate activity exactly, but as a fairly unremarkable aspect of his working method.

There is, of course, something scandalous – to borrow Roland Barthes’ term – about the photographs claim to represent a prescient world truthfully. From the moment the camera’s shutter closes, the image is detached from the objects it purports to represent. Nevertheless, its inherent truth-value remains the photograph as tantalus, despite the fact that it is inescapably wedded to the past. In this respect, far from being an affirmation of an enduring state of affairs the images that the camera gives back to us are of a reality endlessly deferred.

This present publication is the first time that Winstanley has decided to make his photographs available in a purposeful way and there is a sound reason for so doing. As instruments of record they represent a long standing engagement with one project, as we have already remarked, that of visiting and collecting images from all of Britain’s art schools in their closed season, with the purpose of using them as source material for a series of paintings. In the process the photographs have acquired an entirely unexpected force of their own. Taken together, something very close to what Craig Owens describes as allegories has occurred. The photographs seem to have generated what Owens calls ‘supplementary powers of expression’, they have begun to tell their own story. 6

notes 1. Thierry de Duve (ed), The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.

2. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon Books, New York, NY, 1971.

3. Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanised North Eastern Seaboard of the United States, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973.

4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, Telos, no. 31, 1977.

5. James Elkins, What Painting Is, Routledge, London, 1999.

6. Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’, October, vol. 12, 1980.

acknowledgements The artist would like to thank: Alan Watson, Robert Meyrick, Dan Allen, Sue Beech, Natasha Kidd, Robert Fearns, John Butler, Matthew Cornford, Chris Stevens, Bob Hersey, Roger Conlon, Edward Chell, Robert Pepperell, Jane Topping, Steve McDade, John Devane, Kollette Super, Mandy Josen, Graham Chorlton, Carl Robinson, Moira Payne, Stuart Bennett, Gordon Brennan, Virginia Button, Joe Coates, Roger Towndrow, Paul Vivian, John Quinn, Bob Davison, Matt Frederick, Malcolm Chance, Christian Lloyd, Desmond Brett, David Baldry, Bill Gamble, Peter Wolland, Sheila Gaffney, Richard Baker, Bob Brannen, Fiona Kinnell, Ruth Sumner, Juan Cruz, Pauline Whithead, Rachel Carr, Martin Newth, Alan Graham, David Ring, Nicholas Grimmer, Louis Nixon, Ann Hulland, John Timberlake, Lou Adkin, Peter Roach, Kate James, George Blacklock, Andrew Selby, Rachael Jermyn, Ian Hartshorne, Phil Gatenby, Lewis Robinson, Irene Brown, Richard Talbot, Geraint Cunnick, John Czernick, Jonathan Chapman, Mike Evans, Carl Rowe, Sean Cummins, Terry Shave, Claire Simpson, Mark Hathaway, Andy Klunder, David Alker, Gina Field, Alun Rowlands, Mark Purcell, Jon Wills, Nicola Chamberlain, Ian Brown, Sarah Key, Ingrid Fairfax, Peter Wolland, Graham Mitchinson, Tim Davies, Kay May, John Gillett, Alex Schady, Alistair Payne, Su Fahy, Steven Keegan, for providing access to each art school.

Darragh Hogan, Brian Butler, Jay Gorney, Vera Munro, Karsten Schubert, Doro Globus, Tony Waddingham, Maria Fusco and Jon Thompson for their role in the making of the book.

Published in 2013 by Ridinghouse 46 Lexington Street London w1f 0lp United Kingdom www.ridinghouse.co.uk Ridinghouse Publisher: Doro Globus Publishing Manager: Louisa Green Publishing Assistant: Daniel Griffiths Distributed in the UK and Europe by Cornerhouse 70 Oxford Street Manchester m1 5nh United Kingdom www.cornerhouse.org Distributed in the US by RAM Publications + Distribution, Inc 2525 Michigan Avenue Building a2 Santa Monica, CA, 90404 United States www.rampub.com Images © 2013 Paul Winstanley Texts © the authors For the book in this form © Ridinghouse All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A full catalogue record of this book is available From the British Library isbn 978 1 905464 78 4 Edited by Doro Globus Designed by Tony Waddingham in collaboration with Paul Winstanley Set in Tundra Printed by Cassochrome This book would not have been possible without the support of 1301pe, Los Angeles; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York and Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg.