Gary Shaw, Stroke by Christian Kunnert

STROKE | Gary Shaw

This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition Gary Shaw: Stroke at The Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast 6 May to 20 June 2010 Photography: Bryan Rutledge Design: Kunnert + Tierney ISBN 978 1 905989 75 1 © 2010 Gary Shaw, Beate Lemke, Jim Smyth, Byan Rutledge and The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s University Belfast. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the permission of the artist, author, photographer and publisher. Picture credits: P 7: Magritte, René (1898-1967) La trahison des images (ceci n’est pas une pipe), 1929, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Oil on canvas 64 x 94 cm. Purchased with funds provided by the Mr and Mrs William Preston Harrison Collection. © 2010 Digital Image Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource NY/ Scala, Florence P9: Book of Kells, courtesy of Trinity College Library, Dublin P13: Archway from the Darb-i Imam shrine (constructed 1453) at Isfahan, Iran. From Decagonal and Quasi-Crystaline Tilings in Mediaeval Islamic Architecture, Lu, P. and Steinhardt, P., published in Science, 23 February 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1106 – 1110 © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

The Naughton Gallery at Queen’s Lanyon Building Queen’s University Belfast BT7 1NN Telephone: +44 (0)28 9097 3580 Fax: +44 (0)20 9097 3401 Email: art@qub.ac.uk www.naughtongallery.org

Sheer Magic or Pure Mathematics?

Fields of colour, richly filled with pigments, impacting one on the other. Small puddles of watercolour, meandering over the sheet, always close to spilling over at the brim, but contained to a blur in their own bed, with some stain of wetness remaining. Is it all sheer magic? Or pure mathematics? Looking at Gary Shaw’s paintings at first glance one might see them as abstract paintings. But at the same time one has to ask what abstract art actually is. If we take the following question as an example – is journalism closer to reality than literature? – it might sound plausible but is not necessarily so. Whereas the journalist is confined to facts, without validation the author is not so restricted and can convey the essence and truth of the subject by metaphoric comparison. It was Francis Bacon who formulated the idea of the capture of forces as a purpose of art, saying that it is not about reproduction or invention of forms, but exactly about this capturing of forces. Once you’ve been confronted by one of the canvases covered by 50,000 stripes (or maybe three times more) on Gary Shaw’s paintings from 2008, you don’t know but you feel what Bacon meant. It’s a kind of visual flickering, an optical humming. You feel as if you are in a hive, it’s vibrating, buzzing and tickling – it’s just living! Shaw scaled the hurdle of the millennium, so to speak, as a jockey on horseback. At the end of the nineties he was taken by the colourful dress in its endless variety of pattern and colours worn by jockeys. He turned out hundreds of canvases, no bigger than the palm of one’s hand. The small size invites an immediate intuitive effect, as if they have been freshly painted. Unlike the depiction of the abstract, one can sense within them a form of life which one might not have expected. But the mountain is not a mountain and the valley is not a valley. The reluctance to apply titles to his paintings is intentional in order to encourage individual interpretation. Nevertheless, Shaw can “do” nature too. One perceives it. That is why he succeeds in being at ease, even in a formal order. That is how his efforts tap into to ones experience. Between 2002 and 2007 the flag paintings represented the larger part of Shaw’s oeuvre. Flags are used to communicate at sea.

Circles, squares, triangles and rectangles in varying combinations and colouration form the letters of the alphabet. The range of colours is limited to black, white, red, blue and yellow. The subversion (or subversive aspect, irritation even) in the paintings, intended or not, lies in the viewers knowledge of the flag alphabet. Those who know the code are able to decipher that Shaw uses the flags to spell words, phrases and even text passages for instance Greenberg’s Avantgarde and Kitsch. But who among us would be qualified or even willing to read the paintings in this way? The impression of the paintings can seem like an affront to those of us who tend easily to decode, interpret and penetrate in the hope of understanding the secret of what the artist really means. Even the artist himself is in a state of uncertainty and tension. On the one hand he is willing to form, mould, shape and further the knowledge of the dramaturgy of picture and colour, the aspiration for beauty before deciding that the picture is “right”. On the other, he relinquishes some control when he allows the words and texts of strangers to dictate the direction of his brush strokes. Not only do his paintings adhere to the requirements of the abstract but they also surrender themselves to the dictates of the message spelled out by the flags. Shaw’s current work is inspired by Sebastian Truchet, a seventeenth century mathematician. Truchet was driven by the question of how many rectangles are necessary to form a circle. He considered all possible patterns that can be represented by rounding off the edges, the four corners of a rectangle. The artist’s work starts in front of the canvas or on a sheet of paper by the application of geometric forms. A rhythm has to be found, a colour balance. As opposed to other artists who work with geometrical forms, Shaw doesn’t pursue the illusion of space or the three dimensions. It is as though patterns are self forming resembling embraces and labyrinths. One feels an association to cacti or the front crawl stroke of swimmers in a pool. Perhaps the key for Gary Shaw’s paintings is the interior essence that transforms the mathematically traced pictures in the viewer’s eye into something lyrical.

Beate Lemcke, Berlin, 2009

Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Go On, Must Go On Gary Shaw 2004 - 2010 i Le moderne se contente de peu Paul Valery There is something evangelical about abstract art, albeit without the hypocritical negativity of religious fundamentalism. Abstract art was one current of an optimistic modernism which believed that the world could be put to rights, the old order swept away and replaced by the dream of human perfection. It is difficult, in our disenchanted age, to comprehend the mindset of artists who thought that history could be overcome by painting in a new language, a new code, capable of telling the truth. In a world where artists do not want to change the world, simply to exploit it, such ideas seem like comical utopian fantasies. To accept the proposition that art cannot change the world does not commit us to two further generally accepted propositions: that art should not attempt to be utopian or that art should simply and cynically accept the logic of market capitalism. If Rauschenberg wanted to work in the gap between art and life, was he accepting that this gap had become an unbridgeable void? Certainly there is no apparent relationship between the multitudes wandering zombie-like around art museums every weekend engaged in the cultural equivalent of window shopping and the intentions of the art that surrounds them. Artists did not always have to confront this dilemma in such stark terms. A recent exhibition in the National Gallery in London, The Sacred made Real, gives us an insight into a world where painting and sculpture played a decisive role in a society which now seems historically remote and culturally baffling. The religious art of 17th century Spain, with all its gory realism, made the sacred real by connecting the suffering of mere humans with a just yet merciful God. The cooperation between painters and sculptors produced three dimensional images of great ideological and emotional power, designed to rally the faithful against the gray grimness of the reformation.

By the time the philosopher Hegel came to write his lectures on aesthetics at the turn of the 19th century,i this world had almost vanished and the greatness of Spain was but a shadow. Hegel, a German scion of the Reformation, and mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie, drew the conclusion that art had lost its central and autonomous role in society, a role which art can only sustain in a life-world where the connection between selfhood and cultural experience remains unmediated and given. Unlike in ancient Greece or the Middle Ages, the self, in the world of the Enlightenment, can no longer be known in culturally immediate terms. Art loses its immediacy and comes to an end as a selfsufficient mode of truth. Within the context of the times, this was also a sideswipe at the aspirations of the Romantic movement to promote art as a force for emancipation. One does not have to hack through the thickets of Hegelian philosophy to realise the truth of this. To accept Hegel’s dictum that art, considered in its highest vocation is, and remains for us, a thing of the past is not to accept the end of art but that artists have liberated themselves from the tyranny of dictated content and social and political constraints. In an extraordinarily prescient passage in his Lectures on Aesthetics, written almost two centuries ago, Hegel unwittingly drafts a manifesto for modernist art:

Bondage to a particular subject matter and a mode of portrayal suitable for this material alone, are for artists today something past, and art therefore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation any material of whatever kind.

What Hegel could not have seen was the fact that art was forced to confront a world driven by ceaseless change and rupture – the condition of a fractured modernity – a reality that was to become the very raison d’être of modernism and of modern art in particular. The poet William Blake framed the problem succinctly in 1820:

When any view of money exists, Art cannot be carried on.

ii A day will come when, by means of a similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. Michael Foucault The relationship between words and things has been a central preoccupation of thinkers in the modern era. The certainty that words somehow contained the essence of the things they represented or indeed that the world could be represented in an unambiguous way, dissolved as the twentieth century progressed. In linguistics Saussure stressed the arbitrary nature of signs; 10

Ceci n’est pa une pipe. Rene Magritte (1926)

Wittgenstein undermined much of traditional philosophy with his idea of language games and the notion that language was ordinary. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem undermined the attempts of Russell, Frege and others to find a set of axioms basic to all mathematics. The dilemma facing artists – how to represent the world – was part of a broader crisis of traditional cosmologies. No artist was more aware of this than Rene Magritte and his art confronts the philosophical – and profoundly human – question of living between language and the world, between words and things, a constant struggle to puzzle out the mysterious relationship between the two. Is the real world simply a construction of the mind? Is the relationship between image and reality one of treachery, the treachery of language? The series of paintings produced by Gary Shaw some years ago, which was characterised by a move from partial depictions of racing colours to a preoccupation with maritime signal flags pose similar questions. The language of racing colours – where each owner is assigned a unique combination of colours and shapes which can only be decoded if a linguistic meaning – the name of the owner – is assigned to the jockey’s garb. From there a whole field of information opens up: the name of the jockey, the name of the horse and the history of both in terms of their respective form. Without the key to decoding the colours worn by the jockeys a horse race would be meaningless. A better example of the arbitrary yet tyrannical nature of language would be hard to find. The combination of colours, particularly as horses and riders flash past in the course of a race, has an undeniable aesthetic quality and it is this quality that Shaw, in this series, singles out. We don’t have to know the language of racing colours to appreciate the aesthetic quality of form and colour. As works of art these paintings have an independent existence – colour, after all, has its own grammar – apart from the specific imagery and offer a subversive message about the nature of abstract art. 11

iii Picasso saw the danger . . . of materiality – the danger that the new, open atmospheric space of abstraction would be clogged up and weighed down by the mass of its only real ingredient – pigment. Picasso’s concern articulated the fear that abstraction, instead of giving us pure painting, would merely give us pure paint – something we could find on store shelves as well as on museum walls. Frank Stella

In my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of the concrete world, I fled to the form of the square. Kasimir Malevich Is the Book of Kells a ‘work of art’ or a ‘thing of beauty’ – a decorative illuminated manuscript made by pious monks in an isolated Irish monastery during the so-called dark ages? First and foremost, the manuscript is a copy of the four gospels, the foundational text of that then relatively new religion, Christianity. Written words were fragile things in an oral culture where Bakthin’s dictum that ‘language is populated . . . with the intentions of others’ has a keen resonance. Monasteries saw themselves as the repository and guardians of the word: the written word. But is this the only mentality recorded by the monks? The body of the Latin text itself is often inaccurate or corrupted by mistranslations, omissions and mistakes. Little effort was made to correct these transgressions and the text itself pales into insignificance against the sheer exuberance of the illuminations. Language, as a system of signs conveying meaning is not enough to satisfy those concerned with the Book of Kells; the commissioning, production and the efforts made to preserve the book from theft and destruction would seem to indicate a value that went beyond the mere text. The constraints imposed upon other illuminated manuscripts, of material and geometry, are here transcended and subverted. Language retreats before the sheer exuberance and complexity of the illuminated pages. Indeed, the spectre of a pre-Christian world lurks within the vellum sheets dedicated, ostensibly, to the Christian message. We cannot think ourselves back into the mind of ninth century Ireland but we can dimly see how the experience of a Kandinsky might have struck a chord in the scriptorium at Kells. The Russian artist, on confronting one of his own paintings, standing upside down in his studio, had his own epiphany:

ne thing became clear to me: that the objectiveness, the O depiction of objects, needed no place in my paintings and indeed was harmful to them.ii

Kandinsky’s focus was upon emotion and feeling. By disassociating the object from his painting, he tried to evoke an emotional response as well as transmitting a meaning: as in all modern art, meaning is there, but the code becomes more difficult to crack. 12

Book of Kells (c.800) Capital â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Jockey

As far as the illuminations in the Book of Kells are concerned, the key to the code is lost but the idea of art, literature and music as freeing itself from the constraints of form is one we are all too familiar with: it is called modernism. Almost a century after Kandinsky wrote in his 1912 manifest: The Harmonies of Colour and Form must be based solely on the principle of exercising an intentional influence on the human soul.iii the Irish born artist Sean Scully was at pains to stress his agreement with this stance in a 2009 interview: Kandinsky thought that artists should be spiritual teachers. I agree absolutely with this position. Indeed it is my position.iv Scully then takes this a step further: But our nature was made first and evolved out of the nature we live in. My work feeds off this. Off the colours of the sky and the sea and the land and the animals that live in it. No matter how abstract we become, we must always understand that we are the children of our world. A world we have not yet learned to love.v One can almost see the monks who illuminated the Book of Kells nodding in agreement.

iv Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed. T.J.Clark This may seem like a torturous and convoluted way of coming to terms with Gary Shaw’s ‘flag paintings’, produced over a period of ten years. At first sight, these paintings appear to be examples of abstract art, with form and colour constituting the meaning of the works. The vivid use of primary colour makes an immediate impact and in many of the works, the dynamism of the colours appears, at first sight, to overcome any sense of form. Closer inspection of a work such as the triptych ‘A Concise History of Modern Art’ might reveal a consistent pattern, but one visible only to viewers of a nautical bent. For the canvas is entirely made up of naval signal flags tightly painted together, a mysterious language waiting to be deciphered. Nautical flags are signs, composed of combinations of colour, shape and form, which make up a language used to communicate at sea: a form of visual Esperanto. Since signs are arbitrary and have no intrinsic meaning there is no reason why a flag of red and yellow diagonal stripes should mean ‘I am dragging anchor’ rather than, say, ‘Hello sailor’ other than an agreement that this particular sign should have that particular meaning. As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; ‘Words mean what you want them to mean’. We are back to Magritte’s notion of the treachery of language. At one level, the flag paintings confirm this treachery by dissolving the language of flags – a clear and concise language in itself – into the far more complex language of abstract art. Perhaps the mission of abstract art was to develop a universal language and by doing so transcend language itself. Rosalind Krauss seemed to think so in proposing that the grid – central to her analysis of modern art – is impervious to language and hostile to any form of narrative. The structure of the grid forbids the projection of language into a painting: the rest is silence. To reduce painting to its own materiality, a pure analysis of its signifiers was the task Mondrian set himself. His iconic 1916 work, Composition with grid 9, attempts to reduce art to pure relationships ‘through oppositions of colour and line’. Representation or subject matter in painting is an obstacle to understanding the real nature of art – and this applies to all art forms, not just painting. For Mondrian, and abstract art in 14

Nautical Flags

Decorative (2004)

general, the world of things – nature – should be eliminated from painting and the impossibility of this project embodies the eternal fascination and heroic failure of modern art. Shaw’s flag paintings are lodged among the interstices of this complex of problems. On one level there is the attempt to subvert language, the particular symbolic language of flags by showing the relationship between the flags not as representational but as the opposition of colour and line. But there is also recognition that the attempt to negate language is doomed to failure, and the clue to this is in the title of the triptych mentioned above. The reference is to a book by Herbert Read, art critic and anarchist – probably the only anarchist to be given a knighthood by the British state – and if a well read sailor were to decipher the flags on the painting in order, he would recognize part of the first chapter of Read’s book referred to in the title. Language, slippery, mysterious and arbitrary, is a necessary bedrock of human existence and when Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that: Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language. He could just as well have been writing about art. Language will always find its way back into art, just as melody will into music. The flag paintings, dense with colour and created with meticulous care, follow Scully’s dictum and feed off the world around us. At another level they confront the dilemma of abstract art: how to create a narrative without simultaneously destroying it. 15

v The one closed figure in the waste without form, and void! My tetrakyt! Samuel Beckett

All things are known to have a number: without number it would not be possible to know or think anything whatsoever. Philolaos (5th century BC) The heroic attempt of nineteenth century romanticism, not only in art, but as a general cultural phenomenon, to rescue the world ended as an inadequate compensation for the lost world of certainty. The attempt to substitute art for religion, in a world of ‘ . . . shattered glass and falling masonry’ as Marx put it, ends not as an affirmation of the world, but as a nihilistic critique. Modernity – the cultural logic of capitalism – must constantly be seen to renew itself in a society where ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .’ One does not need to be a Marxist to agree with this. The humanist curmudgeon Jacques Barzun pointed out that ‘Destruction by novelty becomes an incessant function of art’ and went on to accuse avant-garde art of ‘corrosive negativity bent upon destroying itself.’ He pessimistically concludes: What is the artist to do, caught between the two prongs of the nihilism at the heart of modernity? Being constantly forced to confront decay, it flees to renewal.vi The more recent paintings in this exhibition may be an attempt to find a way out of this dilemma. In his 2006 exhibition at the Old Museum Arts Centre entitled ‘Locution(s)’ Gary Shaw seemed to be abandoning the constraints of the language of flags and focussing on their visual form. The flags themselves become the object, but are now arranged to emphasise their visual impact alone. Bereft of linguistic logic, the flags speak for themselves: a combination of form and colour. Nautical flags are not arbitrary combinations of form and colour, they follow a rigorous geometric logic reaching back to Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans believed that existence presupposed order and that this order is based upon mathematical laws which make the universe comprehensible and are basic to the existence of beauty. This is what Umberto Eco describes as the western ‘aesthetico-mathematical view of the universe.’ vii Although none of writings of Pythagoras have survived, these ideas found their way into the writings of Plato. In the dialogue ‘Timaeus’ viii Plato took up the earlier theory of numbers – as the Greeks had no symbols for numbers they expressed a number as a ratio of lengths – and the notion of the seven notes of the musical scale as commensurate with the then seven known planets and the interval between them – the ‘harmony of the spheres’. Both these ideas informed the neo-Platonists of the Renaissance and the practice of both architecture and art. The idea of the ‘golden

The tetraktys

Darb-i Imam, Isfahan 1453CE.

Untitled

meanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; became a central organisational principle of Renaissance culture. Paintings and buildings were organized subject to principles of proportion based upon the musical scale and the apparent ubiquity of numbers led philosophers and theologians to conclude that the soul had a mathematical structure. This insight, as Galileo would have it, that the book of the world is written in the language of mathematics, is visible in Cubism, the paintings of Mondrian and the buildings of IM Pei and Le Corbusier. Indeed, Le Corbusier own system of proportion, the Modulor, builds upon the renaissance system.ix The central symbol of the Pythagoreans was the tetraktys, an equilateral triangle based upon the essential numbers 1 (top) and 2,3,4 (base) the sum of which is ten, the perfect number. The tetraktys represents the essence of all possible knowledge and wisdom. By increasing the length of the triangleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s base both numerical and geometric progressions appear: an infinite series of connected equilateral triangles. It is possible that Islamic tiling patterns derive from the form of the Tetraktys but in any event Islamic art depends for its impact on rhythm and endless interweaving fostering contemplation. Burckhardt locates the spiritual impact of Islamic art in repetition, but a repetition which follows mathematical and geometric principles which, unlike in western art, remain untheorised: A sacred art is not necessarily made of images . . . it reflects no ideas but transforms the surroundings by having them share an equilibrium whose centre of gravity is unseen . . . Ornamentation with abstract forms enhances contemplation through its unbroken rhythm and endless interweaving . . . study of Islamic art, or any other sacred art, can lead to a profound understanding of the spiritual realities that lie at the root of a whole cosmic and human world.x

The question of whether Islamic art emerged without a knowledge of mathematics is a fascinating one but if there was a mathematical underpinning to the increasingly complex patterns the written sources have vanished from history. What is clear is that the complex strapwork of medieval Islamic architecture (girih patterns) which developed into the 12th century was underpinned by mathematical principles nor understood for another five centuries in the West.xi Whether these principles were understood or not in the Islamic world – and they could have been understood in a way that is now closed to our modern minds – the idea of geometric harmony as means of transcending nature and everyday life to find a realm of spirituality, which, in the case of Islam, is part of a comprehensive world view. The latest work of Gary Shaw moves in this direction: backwards from the cul de sac of much of contemporary art to find inspiration in geometric harmony and the aesthetics of proportion: a rebellion against the tyranny of nature and the subjections of everyday life. These latest paintings involve the construction of complex repeating patterns reminiscent of Islamic tiling found in sites such as Darb-i Imam in Iran. The complex mathematics which underlie there patterns is not yet fully understood and the appeal of these forms may lie more in the fact that such patterns can be found in nature than any reference to the theory of quasi-crystalline tiling. These paintings have an subtle visual impact on the viewer as the eye takes in the inherent symmetry and continuity of the patterns. Seen as snapshots of what could be unbroken and continuous patterns, the paintings encourage the viewer to speculate on the relationship between colour and form and on the hidden spiritual fulcrum of this form of art. These paintings tell us something about a lost world of certainty, fragments of which still lodge in our sub consciousness. This always has been what abstract art has struggled for, to offer us the beauty found in pure form. In attempting this, abstract art was trying to achieve the impossible: to find beauty in disenchanted world. Unlike in the world of Islam, the link between art, life and nature has been irreparably broken, but the artist must still go on. Let’s go. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot. (despairingly) Ah!

Jim Smyth, Belfast, 2010

Footnotes

G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, 13, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a. M., 1970. Translations by the author. ii Hegel, op.cit., p.498. iii W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Echo Press, 1994. iv Kandinsky , at this moment in 1908, thought, according to Robert Hughes, he had found the Rosetta stone of a new art. Hughes, R., The Shock of the New, p.301. v Smerling, W., Interview with Sean Scully in Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed. The Imagery of Sean Scully, Munich, 2009. vi Barzun, J., The Use and Abuse of Art, Princeton, 1975. vii Eco, Umberto, On Beauty: A history of a Western Idea, Secker and Warburg, London 2004, p.61. viii Cornford, F., Plato’s Cosmology: the Timaeus of Plato, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1997. ix Le Corbusier, Modulor, MIT press, Cambridge, 1968. See also Kappraff, J, Connections: The Geometric Bridge between Art and Science, McGraw Hill, NY, 1991. x Burckhart, T., Art of Islam: Language and Meaning, London 1976. Quoted in Kappraff, p.202. xi Lu, P., Steinhart, P., Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture, in Science, Vol. 313, no. 5815, 23.2.2007, pp. 1106-1110.

Catalogue of Works

Truchet Purple

oil on canvas 46.5cm x 55cm 2009

Truchet Straight Purple

oil on canvas 46.5cm x 55cm 2009

Truchet Orange/Green

oil on canvas 69cm x 69cm 2009

Truchet Orange/Purple

oil on canvas 69cm x 69cm 2009

The Man Who Loved Pictures

acrylic on linen 91.5cm x 91.5cm 2007

White Line Purple/Green

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 91.5cm 2010

White Line 4Way

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 91.5cm 2010

Truchet Square

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 91.5cm 2009

Truchet Red/Blue

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 122cm 2009

Green/Purple

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 122cm 2009

Green/Purple Big

oil on canvas 91.5cm x 122cm 2009

Golf

oil on canvas 152.5cm x 213.5cm 2008

Berlin 1