Selwyn Owen
Not For Sale A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019
Artist Statement Selwyn Owen on Abstract Painting I do not want to refer to painting and particularly abstract painting as an intellectual exercise. If I try to follow an idea or focus on a particular approach or thought I don’t stay the course. I simply cannot program myself to paint in such a manner. From the very beginning I thought of painting as an act of communication… I thought that I actually had a task which was to reach an audience… and so in my early showings I would put little explanations about the pieces and the title beside them. I started with a fascination for color and material. I had not even considered form, not initially… but then, without form nothing would exist on the canvas would it? And still I can go back to color and material as the basis for most of my work. I also had not considered composition-that is to say how things come together - the tensions - the problems of gesture and material. At first I had no knowledge of any of this. And over the years - in the work and in the world - I found these and worked through them and with them in so far as they worked through me and with me.
For the most part, I paint as a response to things… painting becomes a gathering of emotions or other feelings… if one is painting response to life and experience, however vague might be, it is not a thought process… it is not an intellectual exercise. Some days, I’m just happy to go to the studio and start to make a mess while hoping that something will come out of it… other days I feel more decisive in my approach to the work but even this is an emotional state that I happen to find myself in. There is no pre-organization to the work other than laying the colors out… I begin with the primaries… the black and the white… and then I take my mixing pots and I will mix up a batch… I don’t premix anything other than these… what follows for each work becomes an individual experience. I know that some painters always use the same palette - in my mind, this is simply not an option. Painting for me is also a highly ritualistic process. For example, over a period of time which might extend to five or six years, whenever I approached a piece of paper and often the canvas, I would make… initially… the same marks. In other words I would start in the same place – oriented to the same direction with the same inscription and language and would then let the pieces fall where they might from this starting point. I call the works produced in this manner groupings or series.
The idea of always starting in the same place has always intrigued me because, on the one hand, it affords some version of stability to the work - through familiarity - while on the other hand it opens up, almost demands, innovation and transgression of what has already been done. The Monet Tree
91 x 60 cm - 2011
So I’ve come to understand that I work over extended periods of time with things that stimulate me. In this manner, it is possible to produce paintings that speak to one another, that produce a continuation of thought or feeling, that become, in the relation to each other, a continuing expression. I’ve also come to discover that this work in series is an approach which is common to any number of artists across the disciplines. When I’m following through with an idea… what I’m pursuing some intangible which is always slightly beyond my grasp… that’s when painting is really working for me… it is this pursuit, more often than not, that produces what I’ve come to appreciate our accidents… in other words, things happen when I’m painting that are both unexpected and surprisingly productive - but that change the entire nature of the work itself… both from within and from without. This understanding of the role or function of the accident in my work allows it to be one of my most productive tools… so I ask myself, what is the difference between an accident and a mistake? To me a mistake is something moral in nature, a deviation from what is acceptable or known or expected… an accident - on the other hand - is unpredictable and unforeseen. Nobody plans an accident but accidents, as we all know, do happen. To give you an example - for me overpainting is a mistake - not knowing when to stop his mistake. On the other hand - the way a color flows into another… when the new shape or form resonates the plane differently… those are accidents and they can and do change everything.
I’m quite suspicious about the claims that are often made about the value and seriousness of a piece of art. In my mind, this is again more for critics and buyers rather than a fair assessment of the piece on its own merits. For me each work does not have to be profound… it does not have to provide the viewer with an earth-shattering experience… of course, if the painting does in fact provide for such an experience, then this should be acknowledged and perhaps even celebrated. But overall, I think that works of art represent moments, attitudes, and statements even opinions - which may or may not mean anything to anyone including the artist. And to make more of it is simply hypocritical - and even at the extreme - dishonest. I also never felt really strongly about the cult of originality - that is to say - the attempt or need to be innovative at all costs. It’s not really important to me to be one-of-a-kind - although if you think about it - this is probably exactly what happens with this type of thinking. It’s not that I don’t believe that originality doesn’t occur or happen. But perhaps originality revolves around the accident that I discussed earlier. My claim here is simply that while I welcome the accident I do not seek originality for its own sake. In my way of thinking if I provoke an accident - I am in fact making a mistake. The painting… the work… the process… the language… is all about itself. All else-signature-title-provenance-they should all go on the back-out of sight and perhaps even out of mind.
When a River is not a River
82 x 112 cm - 2008
Reflecting Memory — Abstraction, Experience and Remembering in the Painting(s) of Selwyn Owen I don’t want to refer to painting - and particularly abstract painting - as just an intellectual exercise, although I’m sure that some thinking takes place on one level or another when I do the work. 1
Abs - trahere begins etymologically with the removal - through pulling of an object from its environment, the material eviction of a thing from its worldly context; the notion further extrapolates itself to the more erudite conception of the singling out, of the expulsion, through thought, of a particular from the general. In its relationship to the metonymic fragment, abstraction stands for the universalizing propensity of noesis itself, for the compulsive attention to wholeness and meaning which inscribes all attempts to represents. Properties, common features, distinguishing traits and revelatory markings, all attest to a potential for abstraction which, under certain conditions, or rather, under conditions of certainty, allows one to generalize a concept, to create a ‘formal’ category or class of things related though perceived similarities in terms of their contiguous locations within a predetermined and circumspect spatio-temporal apparatus of individual or collective reference. If I try to focus on a particular approach or thought and follow it I don’t stay the course. I simply cannot program myself to paint in such a manner. 2
Abstraction refers us, projects us, impels and compels us towards things which cannot be immediately perceived, expressed, pointed to and isolated; abstraction evades and defies general determinism and singular determination as the causal principle of contingent existence recedes into itself by refusing to call effects into being, by denying the intimate connection between pre-meditation and action, between intention and gesture, between impulse and outcome, between thought and agency. From an epistemological perspective, abstraction solicits and elicits unknowing, through its passive resistance to the interpretative apprehension of materiality expressed in terms of a calculus of instrumental and operational ends.
When I started... I started with a fascination for color and material. I had not even considered form, not initially... but then, without form nothing would exist on the canvas.... would it? And still we can go back to colour and material as the basis for the work. 3
Abstraction is a movement away from matter, form and finitude towards the in-formed, the de-formed and the in-finite; a displacement which must be contained and released by the limits of its own excesses, defined by the parameters of its own impossibility. For La Porte, as for Husserl, an abstraction is something that “occurs” as the thing is isolated from its contingent relationships and removed from the bonds-strictures-constraints-limits devised for its subsistence, when the “in-itself” is finally exiled from the ground of its being as appearance. 4
For Sartres, consciousness itself is the abstraction while the concrete world offers a “synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon constitutes only moments� that is to say, the event-gesturephenomenon - can only be conceived as an abstraction as it presents itself as matter-in-the-world to consciousness.5 Without form, as abstraction, line or colour, tone and timbre, mass and shape, space and time are all allowed to refuse their own existence, transformed into tangible effects at play in the transcendence of immanence, the overcoming of matter inflected, articulated and defined by the self-conscious subject of consciousness itself. I also have not considered composition that is to say how things came together, the tensions the problems of gesture and material. At first I had no knowledge of any of this. Over the years, in the work I found these and I worked through them and with them in so far as they worked through me and with me. 6
Abstraction appears momentarily in the play of correspondences, a relationship that endures, that perseveres beyond immediacy as remembrance and recalling. In abstraction, we intuit the invitation to presence, the invocation to a hermeneutics of being where revelation and concealment, the dialectics of gathering and dispersal, are concomitant terms within the same endless procedure.
Abstraction appears momentarily in the play of correspondences, a relationship that endures, that perseveres beyond immediacy as remembrance and recalling. In abstraction, we intuit the invitation to presence, the invocation to a hermeneutics of being where revelation and concealment, the dialectics of gathering and dispersal, are concomitant terms within the same endless procedure.7
Negation forms, informs, deforms and even reforms the potential structure of abstraction as a destiny of affect, a trajectory of emotion whose fate is realized through rupture, breaks, fissures, chiasma. Negation is structure whose moment of disclosure is contingent as much on a refusal of existence as it is on the fullness of being.8 Nihilation as the shadow of abstraction disappears through the indivisible procedure by which negation affirms its non-being as an essential and irreducible feature which anticipates the emptiness of absence prior to disclosure or signification. I paint in search of the painting‌ The thoughts and hopes that fill the canvas are those of life itself.9 Meaning and Abstraction Probably from the very beginning I thought of painting as an act of communication... I thought that I actually had a task which was to reach an audience... and so in the early showings I would put little explanations about the painting and its title beside it. 10
There is a circularity, or a sense of circulation, a quasi-tautological engagement through the process of displacement in the relationship between meaning, as the product, the result, accidental or intentional, of particular encounters, and abstraction as a process of revelation in withdrawal. The most obvious and immediate site of meaning in the abstract work, the work of abstraction itself, might, initially, be thought to reside in the intentions brought to the work by both artist and viewer/reader/ audience, intentions often betrayed or intuited in the act of naming the work, or, perhaps, in analyzing or discussing it after the fact. Upon reflection, the connection between the name and the thing can only be, at best, conceived as an index, a special order of sign expressing that which is removed and remote, as object, although present through absence; a particular sign of invisible difference in deference to the familiar, the immediate and the known. This act of meaning always, in fact, exist as the reclaiming, the bringing back into a world of familiar things, of the forlorn, the unknown, the misplaced, the forgotten through associative networks and mnemonic efforts.
That approach has since changed, and not only for me. Things have evolved to the point today that when one goes to see an exhibition or has an exhibition the pieces are presented without titles or prices or any other form of explanation. There is a current school of thought that holds that any such displays detract from the painting itself or somehow influence the viewer.11
It is important to anticipate that all inquiries into meaning will, at some point, devolve into a discussion about the nature of language itself. Language, in this sense, is understood as an autonomous system of arbitrary signs, whose symbolic functions and structural relations are its principal signifying features and its most fundamental forms of expression.12 This simple conception, of course, runs aground of itself, almost immediately, in what Barthes termed the mythological dimension of speech, that is, connotation, the interjection of the social circuits of prevarication and ambiguity which forever inform and often, in fact, inscribe the object as sign and propose its complex aggregate as text, to be read according to more or less dominant codes, strategies, maneuvers, routines and conventions which are, in themselves, never either sufficient nor complete.13 Thoughts and their affective correlates, our emotions, are indeed unique systemic inscriptions, as language, to which one inevitably responds in a spurious attempt to decipher and exhaust these markings as inexorably as possible, to completely expunge their putative reality. Yet language also carries, knowingly, the seed of its own critique, an intimate awareness of its own ironic inadequacy whose wish is to conceal itself, to conserve meaning, to preserve the secret origin of its enduring signifying power, even as it presents itself as nonsense and incomprehensibility. Like Blanchot’s disaster, language ruins all meaning, renders it suspect, unreachable, wholly external while leaving it intact; it touches everything and nothing at once.14 It leaves no trace, no visible remainder, like radiation after Chernobyl, measured on a digital counter, seven hundred kilometers away, on the facade of the city hall of Briansk, along with the
temperature and time. Language, rather than construct ‘the house of being,’15 haunts it through the aura of its absence, through the threat of the finality of its disappearance, promising the erasure of the thought of death itself against the horizon of infinity. Again here my distrust of overtly intellectual approaches makes me question this approach.16
There is an insistence in reading a systematic nature, a particular form of structural essentialism, inscribed on all apprehended phenomena as they become interpreted and codified through language. In other words, a sense of order is assigned to objects within the larger field of perception, both internal and external, suggesting their ‘natural’ relationship to each other according to principles and rules which conform to or imitate the rules of language. This avocation for consistency and equivalence betrays an impetus towards a universalizing principle, a teleology expressed in the instinct for stability and repetition through the reassuring practice of mimesis, as a reproduction of the ‘already experienced.’ The avoidance of figurative references in the work of abstract art thus serves to expand the field of possibilities of signification beyond singular contingent meanings whose only relational coordinates are linguistic turns and signs. Distinctions between objects and their styles of presentation further, suggest the interrogation of the presence of intent, as it is expressed, oppressed or repressed in material terms and the resulting ‘effect,’ as it is rendered, accomplished and perceived.
The inability to match the given object with an identifiable subject simply evades or displaces this drive to generate meaning, exposing the compulsive nature of the instinct to categorize technique and procedure as operations of significance in the calculus of resemblance and the logic of affinity. There is no pre-organization to the work other than laying the colors out... I begin with the primaries... the black and the white... and then I take my mixing pots and I will mix up a batch... I don’t premix anything other than these ... the primaries and the black and the white... what follows for each work becomes an individual experience. I know that some painters always use the same palette. For me this is simply not an option.17
Abstraction, as a meaningless procedure, a procedure which resist the production of meaning, is Nothingness standing in the place of nothing else. It is, furthermore, not that Nothing, neither in terms of descriptive nor narrative functions, as it ex-presses no thing instead of any thing or some thing. To glimpse evidence of intentionality, to construct and construe, against all knowledge and certainty, is the deliberate assertion of the incommensurate and inexpressible moments of experience itself, as possibility of meaning, a latency open to its own will uttered in the autonomous language of forms. Meaning in abstraction is the work, the phenomenon, the event, the gesture; to speak of meaning is to speak of the work itself as content and form. There isn’t any distance between the painter and the painting.18
It must also be understood that meaning, some meaning, in art begins at the limit of the sayable, that communication, as transference or reflex perhaps, lies somehow beyond what can be conveyed by words. This conceptual position forces one to look behind, through, above, around or in the work itself in order to develop the relationship with it which might be termed meaningful, when all else fails or succeeds, if these terms are indeed even relevant. So what cannot be said? What is truly inexpressible, absolutely impossible, that which cannot be uttered under any conditions? Is it simply that the systems of signification and communication are too restricted, in their temporality and modes of articulation, too rigorously linear and structural to convey such infinite degrees of severity and magnitude, to describe such complexity as existence ultimately requires? Is this the sublimity that Kant attempted to situate, in theory, at the limit of the apprehendable and comprehensible, the Sublime that Derrida deconstructs as the “almost too much”?19 Of course, this conception of limit, of barrier, of boundary is, by its very nature, also the ability to allude to or infer a beyond, always porous, moveable, open, inviting its own transgression through erasure and forgetfulness. Rightly perhaps, one can propose the knowledge of the disaster as the final disaster of knowledge which seeks to deport us, in the words of Blanchot, “straight to ignorance” so that we might forget “endlessly.”20
When I’m following through with a feeling or an idea... when I’m pursuing some intangible which is always slightly beyond my grasp... that’s when painting it’s really working for me... it is this pursuit, more often than not, that produces what I’ve come to appreciate are accidents... in other words, things happen when I’m painting that are both unexpected and surprisingly productive but that change the entire nature of the work itself… both from within and from without.21
Perhaps there can be no memory of the un-expressible, of the catastrophic, of the disastrous since all such movements exceed their limits, not necessarily as Nancy would have it, by friction or through an “aesthetic of sensible fraying,” that is through a worldliness which reverses itself,22 but rather, as access through rupture and chiasmus, to an entirely distinct and autonomous order of failure as the virtuality of simulation which discloses the absence of being as non-being rather than mere absence. I have always spent quite a bit of time reflecting on where I’ve been... because I know that this helps determine where I’m going... I do try to understand my work... I feel that there is a basis for me to continue painting other than simply having access to materials and time. It’s not so much that I believe in what I’m doing, it is that painting seems to believe in me... and that, as I guessed all those years ago, I would be lost without it.23
orgetting is more than a simple procedure of denial or elimination, a movement beyond entropy and erosion; it is the creation, after the fact, of an irreducible remainder, a trace, a score, a scribble which will persist, transient, displaced and fragmented, ever after. As the studies have shown, in spite of themselves, the problem of memory is not with those who forget, but with those who remember what others forget. Memory is thus a sacrifice, a surrender of oneself to the past in order to maintain that which has been in common, an offering to the other, a gift to community. f
So I’ve come to understand that I work over extended periods of time with things that stimulate me. In this manner, it is possible to produce paintings that speak to one another, that produce a continuation of thought or feeling, that become, in their relation, a continuing expression. I also have come to discover that this work in series is an approach which is common to any number of artists across the disciplines.23
The work of abstraction is, perhaps then, not so much about forgetting as it is about paring, eliminating, methodically and at times painfully, stripping away, line by line, form by form, and word by word, gesture by gesture unto the last sign of utterance or expression has passed from intelligibility, undoing those singular elements constitutive of the relationships which sustain our faith in our ability to generate and maintain stable frames of reference, the illusion of our will to refer to an elsewhere, to ascribe certainty to event and phenomenon through association, to live in a world where cause and effect are not endangered by space and time.
A teacher of mine once confided, in a moment of intimate reflection, that he had strived for so long (he couldn’t remember when he began) to forget all that he had once so jealously and arrogantly sought to know regarding art, dismantling and discarding his accumulation of techniques and aesthetic conceptions, so that he might, at last, do art, as the act of forgetting. This work of abstraction, as such, is further implicated in sacrifice and death. Abstraction is, somehow, sacrifice and death, in so far as these activities are not pure destruction, but rather, as Bataille would have it, the inevitable and necessary expenditure of the excess of existence, the surplus of meaning offered to the impossible Other at the moment of death, the intimate and terrible knowledge of finitude that the executioner gains from his victim in the final moment of life.24 Painting for me is also a highly ritualistic process. For example, over a period of time which might extend the five or six years, whenever I approached a piece of paper and often a canvas, I would make... initially‌ the same marks... in other words I would start in the same direction with the same inscriptions and language and would... then... let the piece evolve from this starting point. This idea of always starting in the same place has always intrigued me because, on the one hand, it affords some version of stability to the work, through familiarity, while on the other hand it opens up, almost demands, innovation and transgression of what has already been done. It’s almost like a rethinking of the myth of Sisyphus, but in reverse.25
The particular elements at work in the field of the present abstraction: the words in Selwyn Owen’s poems and other writings, the shapes, colours and lines in his paintings, the forms and materials in his sculptures and found objects, the doubtless compulsive filling of notebooks as visual diaries, are all empty singularities whose significance has been carved out of them and allowed to dissipate. Any reference to a past still present in the traces can only be verified and validated, as recognition, in the encounter with the Other, in the ineluctable movement away from its own claim to redemption, alienated from the myth of the possible return to origin and meaning. What is truly at stake, in abstraction, what is crucial, is the ability to maintain the paradox, the will to sustain the illusion to presence wherein the elimination of the figure on the frozen ground of the real, its sacrifice and liquidation, also become the means and guaranties of its eventual identification and its right to memory. One cannot help but ask, can art still do... anything, and if so, how, to whom...and finally, to what end? A forensic art, perhaps, that necessarily escapes interpretation, that forbids the revelation of its name, that does not even date itself, that is now invulnerable to commentary and simply exacerbates the question of the possibility of meaning, as identification. This is an art that wants to say nothing, that can say nothing, cannot speak of the present in terms of origin and destination, except as the experience of being present itself.
The painting... the work... the process... the language... is about itself. All else, signature title provenance they should all go on the back out of sight and perhaps even out of mind.26 Pierre Ouellet – Toronto - 2012
EndNotes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. Ibid Sartres, J., P., 1992, Being and Nothingness, transl. Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Washington Square Press, pp. 33-34. Ibid, p. 34. Ibid Ibid See Sartres, J., P., 1995, Essays in Existentialism, New York, Carrol Publishing Group, p. 90. Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. Ibid Ibid This refers to De Saussure’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology and the entire ‘structuralist paradigm. See Barthes, R., 1994, Elements of Semiology, New-York, Hill and Wang and Barthes, R., 1995, Mythologies, New York, Hill and Wang. See Blanchot, M., 1995, The Writing of the Disaster, transl. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London, New Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press. This refers to the essay on “Dwelling” in Heidegger, M., 1996, Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. Alfred Hofstadter, New York, State Harper Row Publishers. Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. Ibid Ibid
19 See Derrida, J., 1987, The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 17-147 and particularly, Part 4, “The Colossal.” 20 See Blanchot, M., 1995, The Writing of the Disaster, transl. Ann Smock, Lincoln and London, New Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press. 21 Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. 22 Nancy, J., L., 1996, The Sense of the World, Stanford California, Stanford Univer sity Press, p. 124. 23 See Derrida, J., 1987, The Truth in Painting, transl. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 17-147 and particularly, Part 4, “The Colossal.” 24 Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved. 25 See Bataille, G., 1991, The Accursed Share, New York, Zone Books. 26 Owen. S., 2011, When the Eye Wanders – the Mind Can Rest, documentary – Life world films – all rights reserved.
A Project Lifeworld E-Publication 2012 - All rights reserved