Sarah Ziessen Contextual Portfolio 2013
www.ziessen.com
Contents Artists Statement Final Exhibition Images Beyond Reach Between the lines References
Artist Statement Through my practice I am interested in exploring the tensions that exists between reality and the systems people use to define manipulate and interact with reality. It seems to me that systems, whether mathematical, scientific, linguistic, religious or any other, make reality simultaneously accessible and inaccessible. It is accessible because over time knowledge is acquired and knowledge grows. It is inaccessible because systems are, by nature exclusionary: The very act of defining reality simplifies and distorts it.
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Sarah Ziessen, 2013. The Bridge, [Oil on canvas 2100 x 1470 x 65mm]. Collection of the artist.
Sarah Ziessen, 2013. Schematic breaks, [Spray paint and acrylic on canvas 2250 x 1500 x 65 mm]. Collection of the artist.
Beyond Reach
"I sense...space. A kind of latitude in what we happily call reality in which, as everybody keeps saying...anything's possible." (Wilkinson & Schenkman, 2007)
Through my practice I am interested in exploring the tensions that exists between reality and the systems people use to define manipulate and interact with reality. It seems to me that systems, whether mathematical, scientific, linguistic, religious or any other, make reality simultaneously accessible and inaccessible. It is accessible because over time knowledge is acquired and knowledge grows. It is inaccessible because systems are, by nature exclusionary: The very act of defining reality simplifies and distorts it. As Graham Harman say in his lecture Art and Paradox “there is always an excess of a thing beyond any attempt to define or known it� (Giraud, 2012). For me the truth is always veiled, and yet I strive to know it. In doing so I vacillate between the reductionist position in which I
endeavor to understand the world by breaking it into smaller and smaller parts, and the gestalt, in which I see the world as being more than the sum of its part. As in Heidegger’s philosophy there is a constant reversal between the depth and the surface of objects (Geoghegan, 2012), for Heidegger being “always entails a partial absence from view rather than a simple lucid presence� (as cited in Harman, 2007, p.45). In my practice, I explore reality and its various paradoxical qualities through the integration and juxtaposition of diverse aesthetic languages: abstraction and realism, control and spontaneity, natural and synthetic. Ambiguity plays a central role in my work, it indicates that which is unknown and invites the viewer to look for meaning, a condition that is central to my experience of reality. At present I am very interested in the philosophical writing of Graham Harman. What has caught my attention is that his approach to philosophy acknowledges an aspect of reality that is beyond reach. I see this as relating directly to art; like poetry or a good joke, that which makes art special is obtuse, if you spell it out too literally you lose the essential quality. Thus, good art connects us to the essential ambiguity of our existence. Within the pictorial realm, this quality of the unknown is alluded to by ambiguousness, the undetermined and the distortion of illusionistic space. It is a metaphysical construct that can be found,
hidden within abstraction. The word found is imperative here: Just as an understanding of the world is gained by interactive experience so to must meaning be found in painting by the activity of the viewer. It is not on the surface but suggested at, and ultimately only found in the viewer’s imagination. This is the essential tension expressed between form and content, known and unknown, being and beings. In the introduction to Vitamin P2, Barry Schwabsky defines the ambiguous nature of much contemporary painting as “potential images�. These are images which reside in a transitory state between representation and abstraction, allowing the viewer to contribute to the final interpretation through observation and imagination (2011.p. 14). In Purity and Danger (Ziessen, 2013) I explore the possibilities of this transitory state by bringing together the rigid grid with organic imagery. The sense of opposition is enhanced by the use of complementary colours, red and green. For me it is as if two systems are forced into an uneasy union. This painting allows me to contemplate the relationship between nature and the human structures which exclude life.
Sarah Ziessen, 2013. Purity and Danger, [Oil and Acrylic on canvas 595mm x 495mm]. Collection of the artist.
In her book, Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas writes that The yearning for rigidity is in us all. It is part of our human condition to long for hard lines and clear concepts. When we have them we either have to face the fact that some realities elude them, or else blind ourselves to the inadequacy of the concept. (1966, p.163) I am unwilling however to accept this as fact and would rather find a middle way, which allows for the integration of systems, even of those that exist beyond current knowledge.
Sarah Ziessen, 2013. Stop smiling; I’m trying to be serious, [Acrylic on canvas 100 x 70 cm]. Collection of the artist.
In Stop Smiling; I’m trying to be serious (Ziessen, 2013) the grid is juxtaposed against spontaneous, calligraphic brush marks. For me, the opposing nature of the marks expresses the essential dualism on which the basis of “peoples construct of meaning is based” (Park, 2006, p.9). Despite the incongruity of the marks, the painting exists and as such represents the possibility of oneness and the negotiation of a middle way.
The grid is a recurring motif in my paintings; it indicates the human desire to identify the systems which underpin our world. It is the map, graph, periodic table, e=mc2. It is uniquely human (BBC, 2011). For me, the grid is always incomplete, inadequate. The grid outlines only the relations not the essence of the objects. “Clarity does not get us truth. Clarity gets us a kind of superficial crust that looks like a truth because reality itself is not an explicit proposition, reality itself is something deeper than what we say about it and so therefore the only way to get at reality is to allude, to hint to suggest� (Geoghegan, 2012).
Sarah Ziessen, 2013. The Bridge, [Oil on canvas 2100 x 1470 x 65mm]. Collection of the artist.
In The Bridge the strict, rigid system of the grid is broken through by the child like doodle, revealing a fragment of realism and, right at the center; light. This is my largest painting to date and I have found an interesting dynamic occurs with increased scale: There is an element of de-commodification with a large painting. A large scale work is simply not going to fit inside most people’s homes. And maybe because of that it is less likely to be viewed in terms of its home decorating qualities or with desire but rather with a Kantian disinterested glance (Eaton, 1999, p.12). As an artist, disassociating the work from its revenue generating potential is quite liberating. As is, of course the expanse of a large canvas, a world to dive into and get lost in, for the artist and viewer alike. In the 2013 lecture called Picasso and the concept of the Masterpiece Arthur C. Danto argues that artists make specific decisions about which materials they use when they believe they are about to create a masterpiece. “By investing in a large-scale canvas, its lining, and other expensive materials for a painting, an artist demonstrates the meaning this particular work intended to have relative to his other works so far� (Danto, 2013). Whilst, it would be absurd to suggest that I am creating a masterpiece, I do sense that the threads of my practice are finally unwinding from a chaotic tangle to pull together in a purposeful direction, which expresses my interests more coherently.
The most interesting dynamic of the large canvas is that the scale overwhelms the visual field, immersing the viewer whilst simultaneously pushing them away so that they are able to see the work in its entirety. This sense of tension between near and far; detail and overview, echoes Heidegger’s constant reversal between surface and depth (Geoghegan, 2012).
Sarah Ziessen, 2013. These cracks appeared [Oil and Acrylic on aluminium 105 x 105cm]. Collection of the artist.
These cracks appeared (Ziessen, 2013) is the most ambiguous of my recent works. It is based on an image of foliage but the abstraction pulls the form either from or toward recognizability. My aim in this painting is to indicate layers of being. First there is the precise grid beneath, then the increasingly organic grid above and the areas where the aluminum is left bare, reflecting the world in which the painting resides. The square painting is said to be the most self-referential format alluding neither to landscape or portrait. (Buster & Crawford, 2006, p.70) In this work this self-referential quality contrasts with the outward reflective nature of the aluminium, playing again with juxtapositions of contrasting qualities. By using ambiguous imagery I strive to capture the quality Graham Harman calls allure: This is the attraction of something that has retreated into its own depths. An object is alluring when it does not just display particular qualities, but also insinuates the existence of something deeper, something hidden and inaccessible, something that cannot actually be displayed. Allure is properly a sublime experience, because it stretches the observer to the point where it reaches the limits of its power, or where its apprehensions break down. To be allured is to be beckoned into a realm that cannot ever be reached. (Bryant, Srnicek & Harman, 2011, p.302)
For me, arts ability to provide an experience of the sublime is the most profound of its capabilities. It correlates to the sense of wonder I feel when I contemplate the essence of reality and the scope of human knowledge against the great expanse of the unknown and the infinite. It is an elusive quality that can only be experienced in the viewer’s mind and when achieved represents the ultimate union between the duality’s of form and content; artwork and viewer.
Between the lines My artistic practice is inclined towards a formalist approach in which composition and visual appearance are favoured over narrative content. My aim has been to create beautiful objects which please the viewer. However, I am increasingly interested in the poststructuralist theories which investigate relationships between the art objects and their meaning, or the signifier and the signified, and how the inference of meaning impacts on our ability to consider artwork beautiful. In this essay I shall examine my interpretation of signs in the work of Bridget Riley (b. 1931) and Peter Halley (b. 1953) in relation to their artistic intent. These artists are particularly interesting because they use geometry and abstraction which are able to signify wildly divergent ideas such as purity, constraint, nature and artificiality. The concept of Beauty is seemingly simple: “The quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit� (Webster, 2003, p.108). But further investigation shows it to be more complex. Since World War I, beauty has been viewed with suspicion, seen as at best a feather bed for the bourgeois and at worst an instrument of propaganda for the nefarious and powerful.
As a consequence the art world has increasingly embraced an intellectual rather visual mode. The exclusion of beauty in favour of intellect is epitomised by Marcel Duchamp, who in 1951 upturned a wheel on a stool and declared it art. In so doing he opened the aesthetic landscape and put “art back in the service of the mind” (Alberro, 1999, p. 102). In rendering both the wheel and the stool functionless Duchamp symbolically removed the primary functions of classical art; beauty and transcendence. In this succeeding postmodern era anything can be viewed as art, and that includes a plethora of self-referential, insincere and vacuous rubble. In his essay Ashes for Beauty, Arthur Danto asked if in abandoning Beauty “art sacrificed that which gives it its deepest meaning?” (as cited in Benezra, 1999, p.184) It is this question which lies at the core of my practice as for me art must have meaning beyond the circulating banality in which “it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art” (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 111) Danto, among others believe that in order for beauty to re-enter critical dialogue it needs to be reconsidered and re-contextualized (Danto, 1999, p. 195). In the symposium Beauty Matters, Muelder Eaton presented two opposing aesthetic definitions of beauty; the Kantian and the contextual (Eaton, 1999). She describes the Kantian as formalist and disinterested, and the contextual as informed by knowledge or morals (Eaton, 1999). Through
my art work I aim to explore the area where these two positions intersect, where beauty becomes an agent for moral and intellectual practice, and where understanding through meaning can expand the possibilities of what is perceived as beautiful. Peter Halley and Bridget Riley are artists who, like me use formalist strategies of geometry, line and colour. However the theoretical structures underpinning their work are quite distinct. Halley is heavily influenced by postmodern philosophical theory of Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, whereas Riley is concerned with the viewer’s visual experience and formal relationships. In the 1980s Halley developed the 3 primary icons: The cell, the prison and the conduit. These elements can be seen as representation of his New York environment: the horizontal and vertical lines of the streets, the buildings, the elevators, his paintings are diagrams indicating the restriction of Cartesians geometry on his freedom to move and the isolation of urban life (Halley, 2012). The use of icons grounds Halley’s work in the worldly materiality, and this is reinforced by titles such as Instant City, 1996, Three Prisons 2006 and Web 1995.
Peter Halley, 1985. Prison & Cell with Smokestack & Conduit [Acrylic and Roll-A-Tex on canvas 63 x 108 inches]. Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy
Halley is influenced by hard-edged geometric abstraction, the colour field artists and minimalism. Like them he uses paints found in industrial applications; Roll-A-Tex, pearlescent and day-glow which he noticed “in packaging and in supermarkets” (Cone, p. 1986). Their use points towards the artist’s philosophical concerns, of urbanization and industrialization whilst implying sympathy with those concerns.
Although Halley’s work shares visual attributes with the minimalists, he challenged their claims to have “achieved intellectually neutrality, Cartesian clarity, even Marxist integrity” (Halley, 2013) through geometric form. Instead he indicates that in contemporary communities geometry has come to represent the architectural structures of urban life and the digital interconnectedness (or disconnectedness) that represent coercive social control the technological grid (Institute of Fine Art, 2012). “Where once geometry provided a sign of stability, order, and proportion, today it offers an array of shifting signifiers and images of confinement and deterrence” (Halley, 1984). In Halley’s paintings the motifs are regimented, stark, hard and imposing. The world he represents is lifeless; there is no hint of reference to nature. The day glow colours throb like the electricity pulsing from televisions and neon advertising in the most sordid streets of Soho. The corners are hard and bare. In the land of Halley’s prisons and cells there is no room for even a single leaf, let alone a tree.
Peter Halley, 2010. Tangled (diptych [Day-Glo acrylic, pearlescent and metallic acrylic, and Roll-a-Tex on canvas 228.5 x 315 x 10 cm] Gary Tatintsian Gallery, New York, USA
Despite his challenges to minimalist ideas and modernist ideology’s, Halley shares many of their formal concerns; he is a bold colourist and regularly reworks the same composition, as many as ten times, changing the colours
in an analysis of their activation of space. Further interest is provided by the juxtapositions of paint textures, as in the red of the day-glow and Roll-A Tex paint in Tangled, 2010. It is in his concern for colour relationships that Halley’s work is most similar to Bridget Riley’s. In her painting Evoë 3 2003, Riley uses a small pallette of four colours. The blue and the green being equally luminant. This produces an effect of instability and movement across the picture plane, aided by the strong structure of diagonals from the bottom left to top right. The illusion of movement brings liveliness to Riley’s painting that is not present in Halley’s static compositions despite the similarities in surface flatness and formal balance.
Bridget Riley. 2003. Evoë 3, [Acrylic and oil paint on canvas 1934 x 5820 x 50 mm], London, England: Tate
The Matisse like arabesque curve “is wonderfully fluid, supple and strong. It can twist and bend, flow and sway, sometimes with the diagonal, sometimes against, so that the tempo is either accelerated or held back, delayed” (Kudielka, 2009, p. 171). The theoretical basis of Riley’s work lies not in the philosophical concerns but in the interactions of form and colour through repetition and randomness. Throughout her life Riley can be seen to have worked “methodically, though not necessarily mathematically” (Lee, 2004, p. 164), repeating formal units until they generated subtle irregularities that she endeavoured to uncover (Lee, 2004). The resulting canvases seem to pulse with life; flickering and vibrating in an illusion of depth. Despite their abstract nature and hard lines, Riley’s paintings evoke nature; the ripple of leaves in the wind, waves breaking on the beach or light piercing through a forest. As geometry underpins our natural world, in atoms, snowflakes, trees and rocks (BBC, 2011), so Riley’s work is built on a foundation of geometric structure; the grid, the curve the rhomboid. Just as the forces of nature distort perfect geometry creating an elaborate world so Riley ruptures the symmetry in her paintings, introducing elements of randomness, creating complex arrangement with limited building blocks. Riley’s paintings reward the patient viewer, changing “constantly, on prolonged inspection” (Robertson, 1992). I find that the more I look, the more I see and am drawn into the painting, For example, in Between 1989
below, I start to notice relationships forming between the colours, my eyes dance between the pink and the grey, the grey begins to take on an orange glow, the vertical stripes bend up and to the left, one moment the orange is in front and the next behind that sap like green.
Bridget Riley, 1989. Between [oil on linen 165 x 227 cm] Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany
Riley states that in her work she tries to “take sensation as the guiding line and build, with the relationships it demands, a plastic fabric which has no other raison d’etre except to accommodate the sensation its solicits” (Moorhouse, 2003, p. 138). This intention is underscored by titles such as Breath 1966, Ease, 1987 and Nataraja 1993. Despite the geometric foundation of both Riley and Halley’s work I experience them quite differently. In Muelder Eaton’s terms Riley’s work delivers a Kantian experience, in which colour, form and pure, disinterested visual pleasure provide an experience that transports me from the everyday. Whereas Halley’s work provides a Contextual experience in which the hard lines and cellular structures alludes to intellectual considerations of the everyday, In his essay, The Crisis in Geometry Halley states that: There are a great many artists today who both shun the attempts to critique geometry and the media, and who seem convinced that through intuition, the subconscious, and the traditional means of oil painting, they can restore "life" to this lifeless world. (1984) Yet Halley’s critique is clearly biased. The urban geometry of his paintings represents the threat of industry and technology to the natural world. Halley’s geometry does not attempt to restore life; it denies its very existence. It turns its back on nature and enters into a reflective exchange
with the dead geometry of city and media. Any allure in form is that of calculated advertising; seductive yet unsatisfying. In this way I find Halley’s paintings as disturbing as Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-1823. It is not just art devouring itself but also nature and humanity.
Francisco Goya, 1819-1823. Saturn Devouring His Son. [Oil on canvas 1.43 m x 81 cm] Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
In contrast Riley’s paintings are capable of providing the life affirming experience of beauty, liberating the viewer from the mundane banality of daily life. A window open (if only temporarily) to a peaceful utopia. Riley shows that a response to Halley’s accusation may in fact lie in the tradition means of oil that he shuns. As Iris Murdoch says; The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. (Murdoch, 2003). It is reassuring to see that contrary to Roland Barthes announcement of “the death of the author” (Newall & Pooke, 2008, p.168), and despite my subjective and personal approach, both Riley and Halley are able to use image and linguistic signs to successfully communicate their artistic intent. Whilst I am able to connect with both artists intellectually it is Riley’s work that I find truly pleasurable and therefore beautiful. Perhaps the success of Riley’s painting for me is in part due to the lack of iconography which releases the work from weight of the everyday and allows me to connect spiritually as well as intellectually. Halley’s paintings are interesting and provide a stimulating window to postmodern dialogue and concerns; however my dislike of industrialisation with which they
sympathise prevents me from seeing them as beautiful. It is undeniable that geometry is ubiquitous and influential, but what it signifies is more allusive; maybe life, maybe death, maybe something in between. To navigate this terrain one needs to engage both the eyes and the mind. It this way art is able to be both Kantian and contextual and still be subjectively beautiful. I believe it is through beauty and the exultation of both mind and spirit that art is capable not only of providing value based social criticism but also of keeping alive the hope of a better world.
REFERENCES
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Danto, A.C. ( 2013, January 1) Picasso and the concept of the masterpiece [audio file]. Retrieved from http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/audio-video/audio/dantopicasso.html Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. London, England: Routledge Eaton, M. M. (1999, Winter). Kantian and contextual beauty. 57 (1). The journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11-15. Goya, F. (1823). Saturn Devouring His Son [Image]. Retrieved from: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/francisco-goya/saturn-devouringhis-son-1823-1 Geoghegan, G. B. (2012, February 15). Graham Harman’s object lesson [audio file]. Retrieved from http://bernardg.com/podcast/grahamharmans-object-lesson-episode-4 Giraud, L. (2012, September 9). Graham Harman - art and paradox [Video file]. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/53793807 Halley, P. (1984). The crisis in geometry. Arts Magazine, 58, No, 10. Retrieved from http://www.peterhalley.com Halley, P. (1985). Prison & Cell with Smokestack & Conduit [Image]. Retrieved from:
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