detail (detail)
This paper will explore different ways of looking at painting
contained within the thinking process behind (detail). The exhibition
developed from the scrutiny involved in looking at paintings in
distinct circumstances; the studio, gallery, in various forms of
reproduction and from the point of view of another art form, in this
case cinema. In keeping with the ethos of the show I will flit between
several different ideas and subjects, including how my painting
practice informed curatorial decisions, through to ideas such as
looking close up, the reproduced painting and collage. I will go on to
discuss parallels between the ‘eye’ of a painter and the idea of ‘eyes’ of
cinema. I aim to show that there is something particular to the way of
looking, in both painting and film, one which is away from the main
event.
Over the last few years I have been producing several series of works
that have dealt with ideas around the reproduced painting In
Transitory Paintings, I use reproductions of figurative paintings
normally found in auction catalogues; as they pass from private
owner to private owner and are only seen by a public for a brief
moment when the pop up at auction, I cut a series of triangles away
from the reproduced painting to leave an image that both contains
the original in fragments spread over the skeletal structure and also
abstracts it.
In ReconFigure Paintings, the figure in historical figurative paintings
is replaced parasitically by my painted geometric structure, to open
up alternative ways of looking. It was born from when I look at
paintings my eye wanders off from the main focus, usually the figure
and looks to and focuses on other things;
the hills in the background hold more interest to me than Mona Lisa’s
smile, or the edge of the stretcher and how the canvas has been
attached in las Meninas is just as captivating as the gaze of Valasquez
or the mirrored Royal Couple.
By painting over the figure, I sort to take the attention away from the
figure to other parts of the reproduced painting or to start to conjure
up possibilities for what or who might be below in the mind of the
viewer; whilst also creating a tension between the original and
reproduction, the representational and the abstract and so on.
(detail) moved the use of reproduced paintings and ways of looking,
from a painting practice into that of the curatorial. It features
photographs of close ups from 118 different paintings selected by the
artists who created them, with what constituted a detail also being
left for the artists to decide. These details were printed and displayed
en-masse in the gallery. The exhibition is both a group show of 118
artists, and a room-sized collage.
As we know a reproduced painting is fundamentally different to how
a painting is primarily experienced in the flesh, a reproduction can
never reproduce the experience of actually seeing a painting.
However the reproduced close-up can allow us to get closer to an
experience of actually being in front of the painting, than a whole
image of the painting, it allows us to give attention to the brush
strokes, surface and explore the minutiae of the painting, as in this
piece from (detail) by Thomas Wright. Kenneth Clark’s book, One
Hundred Details From the National Gallery is a precursor to (detail),
being arguably the first context where the notion of the photographic
detail of painting was explored in depth. The premise of the book was
to pair paintings from across genre, geography and time, with an
emphasis by Clark on bringing out beauty and to create analogies and
contrasts.
Clark recognised, in 1938, that as a culture, we increasingly don’t
look at pictures carefully enough and saw a power in the
photographic detail to enable us to value patient scrutiny. He wrote
that, “They are, in fact, an aid to appreciation more valuable, because
more concrete than the numerous books on how to look at pictures
they fulfil one of the first functions of criticism by presenting familiar
material from a fresh point of view.” (In Clark, 2008, p. 7) This idea of
the detail of the reproduced painting offering a new perspective is
still prevalent today, the close up is seen across different contexts,
the guardian tests our knowledge in a weekly quiz, social media
teams with glimpses of works by painters showing new works in the
studio to James Elkin’s enlightening insights in books such as What
Painting Is
Perhaps in the same manner as some passages from Elkin’s book and
In a more extreme way than Clark form of close up, Malcolm Morley
has claimed that looking at a painting under a microscope changed
his approach to painting; saying, “…that’s really where the energy of
the painting was – in all those tiny strokes. I realized I wanted to see
through and into, instead of across.” (Bonnet & Mangion 2010, p. 18)
This is brilliantly illustrated in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in a scene
where the delinquent teenagers choose to go to a gallery to look at
art as they skip school! Cameron Fry appears to ‘zone out’ when
looking at A Sunday on La Grande Jette. The camera increasingly
zooms into the painting, going beyond Seraut’s dots into the weave of
the canvas, as a metaphor for the character’s state of mind. Painting
is something that has much more beneath the surface and the activity
of really looking offers a space for thought, meaning and other (as yet
unknown) possibilities. In a gallery I often start up close to a picture,
as when painting in the studio and then move in and out, sometimes
imagining what could lie potentially beyond the frame.
In Grids, Rosalind Krauss talked of how a window frame limits our
view of the landscape, whilst confirming our certainty that the world
continues beyond it. Krauss also wrote that, primarily, Modernist
paintings that use the grid, only present, in her words “…a mere
fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger
fabric. Thus the grid operates from the work of art outward,
compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame.” (In
Krauss, 1997, p. 18) I would argue that this could be equally true of
most paintings, rarely is a painting so complete that the frame fully
contains it and the mind cannot expand possibilities beyond the
composition.
Like the window frame, the photographs in the exhibition are each an
image themselves that we know does continues beyond it’s edge, as
we know that they are a fragment of the original painting, as
illustrated in my own contribution.
Based on our knowledge of the painting this is either known or
unknown, to be imagined or ignored. So the photographs in (detail)
are taken from the original paintings by each of the 118 artists, but
they are also removed from the context of the original,
as we can see here in this work by Dominic Shepherd, the image of
the painting is changed when we see first the detail from the
exhibition, which could be read as a complete composition.
to when we see the actual painting
In each case we are seeing an image created by Shepherd, on the
right a photograph of the painting he has created, and on the left a
photograph of the detail he selected of the painting at the same size;
but the context is changed by what and how much we see. By making
the images all the same size and shape, then there is another sort of
equalising and reading of the images.
When seen on mass in a grid, they hint at an almost infinite amount
of possibilities in the connections created between images. This is
akin to how we process and make choices in an increasingly image
saturated world, the way we see images online, in shops and on the
streets is becoming more than ever a complex collage of information
for us to make sense of.
Collage as a mind-set has increasingly become something filtered
across contemporary art practices, including of course painting; the
idea of collage in (detail), is extended beyond the arrangement of
artworks in a space, into the changing placement of these artworks
and the overall tone of the exhibition as it moves from venue to
venue. In Bangkok the distinctive existing framework on the walls
dictated the number of artists that would be in the exhibition and
also decreed in this instance the images shape and size so that each
fitted into the panels. The placement of works in this case was
decided by someone else.
In London the order was arranged by pulling names out of a hat and
the height of the gallery dictated the size of the squared images so
that they hung 4 deep in the space to create a grid that filled all the
walls, resulting in surprising, unplanned partners for each image.
In Lincoln the images remained the same size as London but were
released from the grid and from necessarily being the right way up.
The feel for the hang was conceived with another curator, to try to
conjure the artist’s movement of images on a flat surface when trying
to create collaged compositions. The eye of the viewer constantly
darts back and forth; fragments become the whole and vice versa.
(detail) is not an exhibition of paintings, it is an exhibition about
painting. A consistent response to (detail) has been that it has made
people want to see actual paintings, perhaps ironically more so than
if it had been a show full of ‘paintings’. This both confirms Benjamin’s
notion of the aura of the original artwork, but also extends it. I would
argue that the reproduction can also make you desire a painting
more than you might if the original was actually there. In the case of
(detail), the absence of the original paintings, whilst being almost
there by being printed reproductions of details, perhaps makes the
original more wanted, in the same way that a crossed out word
makes you want to read it even more. In his essay ‘What do pictures
want?’ W J T Mitchell speculates whether a picture can have a kind of
mastery over the viewer.
Mitchell quotes from Michael Fried’s paper, Absorption and
Theatricality, “a painting had first to attract the beholder, then to
arrest and finally to enthral the beholder, that is a painting had to call
someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself and hold him there as if
spellbound and unable to move”.
Mitchell immediately adds that “the paintings’ desire, in short, is to
change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyse the beholder,
turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture in what
might be called.“ the Medusa affect”(In Mitchell, 2005, p36). This
creates a strange position on how we look at paintings, especially as
Mitchell goes on to conclude that paintings do not want any thing
from us apart from to be asked what they want! The Medusa effect
Mitchell talks off and the ability of a painting to paralyse a viewer is a
familiar one to me.
For me this power of painting and how the viewer becomes
transfixed by the experience of looking, is intrinsically linked to the
notion of the suspension of disbelief of the cinema. Like in a gallery,
the loaded space of the cinema allows the audience to step out from
the immediate surroundings and enter into the film space, the film
can mesmerize and apparently displace the viewer’s presence to that
of the narrative of the film. Not only can painting (art) and film both
transfix a viewer, but there is also something akin to how both can
allow the eye to wander or to take in and notice details around the
main action, we pick up on these details and they inform our viewing,
even if we are only subconsciously noticing them, we are drinking
them all in
In this scene from one of the most painterly of film director’s, Alfred
Hitchcock, the camera swings around a flat, the eye takes in all sorts
of incidental details; the green of Jimmie Stewart’s top against the
orange curtains, to the coffee pot on the coffee table, to the night
outside, to the pictures on the wall, to the white washing hanging in
the all white kitchen, the streak of purple and orange creates
something like an abstract expressionist painting and so on. The way
we can look at film is similar to the experience of looking at painting
in the studio and the gallery, the eye darts and takes in all this visual
information. The film, like Mitchell’s notion of pictures, does not want
anything, but we benefit from noticing and asking questions of it, to
try to unlock meaning. As you will have just noticed, this is actually
the painter David Reed’s version of Vertigo, where his work, Painting
#496 has been inserted into his perfect location for his work, the
bedroom, and specifically in this case the bedroom of the characters
Scottie from Vertigo, as shown here and also in a parallel work,
featuring Judy’s bedroom. I am reminded, in a context removed from
what Morley meant, of his desire of wanting to see through and into;
to actually get into and inhabit a work. In fact this is the second
version that Reed has made of this work,
The first created in 1994 featured a different work in Scottie’s
bedroom, Painting #297. The film is usually show as an installation
featuring the video playing on a monitor in front of a reproduction of
the bed with Reed’s painting that features in the scene hanging above
it.
A newer version is currently on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof. As
Reed explains, “I wanted to make it clear that the bedroom was not
done for just one painting but that several, or perhaps any, painting
of the right size could be inserted into the bedroom. I didn’t want it to
seem that the color or forms in some way made this the only painting
that fit into the bedroom. Originally the insertions were made in
video tapes of “Vertigo”. I’ve just updated the versions as the
technology improved. I like it that there are versions with several
paintings.” End quote; I am much taken with how this also places
‘pure’ painting into an arena of collage and of testing, not of finality.
Somehow the changing of paintings by Reed in the Vertigo work also
fits with many of the film’s themes around representation, mistaken
identity and substitution.
Reed has consistently cited the presence and influence of the
cinematic in his paintings, something seen in things such as the
stretcher paralleling film formats, the sweep of gesture being akin to
camera movement and in the montage-like use of build up and
editing of marks. Reed’s insertion of his paintings into Vertigo creates
a directly seen relationship between cinema and painting, but this is
something inherent in much of his work form the last two decades.
There is for me something about the films of Dziga Vertov and his
inventive use of the camera and of montage that is aligned to the
composition of Reed’s paintings and beyond this to the ‘eye’ of the
film director mirroring that of the painter, who sees the whole
through details. Vertov’s idea of the Kino-Eye is intrinsic to this as
seen in his famous proclamation:
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the
world as only I can see it.” (In Michelson, 1984, p. 17)
This buys into the notion that Vertov saw the camera as more perfect
than the human eye for, in his words, ”the exploration of the chaos of
visual phenomena that fills space.” (In Michelson, 1984, p. 15)
However the Kino-Eye is not simply the view of mechanical camera
lens. Vertov saw the Kino-eye as Kino-eye = kino-seeing (I see through the camera) + kino-writing (I
write on film with the camera) + kino-organization (I edit).” (In
Michelson, 1984, p. 87)
Importantly this puts the Kino-eye away from the camera and the
machine and back into the focus of the person who creates, I SEE, I
WRITE, I EDIT. This to me links it back to the artist; the artist sees
and notices, they ‘write’ with what they create and they, along with
the curator, ‘edit’ through their decisions over what is then seen and
with what.
Here we see the camera and the camera-man kino-writing this scene
of every day life in an extraordinary way, then something even more
extraordinary happens, Vertov reveals film for what it is, still images
being shown very quickly. The details of life that the Man With A
Movie Camera depicts are together just as much, if not more, ‘whole’
than more established forms of narrative and his isolating of
individual frames pulls us out from our normal way of seeing film.
Vertov shows us in this clip all three of the components of the Kino
Eye equation- kino-seeing -kino-writing - kino-organization.
Like the film editor seen in a moment, the projectionist is acutely
aware of the individual frames of film when they handle, make up
and project. They also have a unique and rather strange way of
viewing films, something I have experienced first hand; peering
through a scratched, dirty window, the big screen appears miniature
from the booth. The clattering roar of the projectors drowns out any
semblance of a soundtrack and the narrative becomes deeply
fractured and mixed up with other films, as the projectionist dart
from projector to projector to change reels. As the end of the reel
approaches the projectionist forensically examines the film, keeping
a watchful eye out for the cue-dots as Ed Norton explains here.
Play fight club clip
A projectionist for example would see the film, zoomed in and in part,
like this.
As opposed to how the audience sees the film like this. Looking out
for cue dots or cigarette burns would allow the projectionist to get to
know (often forgettable) parts of a film in intimate detail and I was
struck by how insignificant moments can become potent when they
are removed from the narrative of a film.
Frames is a series of hundred’s of different paintings on 35mm
celluloid filmstrip, made in part as a response to the projectionist’s
way of looking. Each painting features an image of one frame taken
from a film. Each single image was taken from hundreds of thousands
of possibilities that appear for 1/24 of second during the length of
each film and was chosen as not being memorable to the viewer and
outside the overall narrative, something thats not noticed.
A projectionist work is best done when no one notices that they are
there; their presence is only visible when an error occurs such as
when the film breaks or burns. Maybe this is a little like the role of a
film director, curator, or artist. We don’t necessarily notice the
person or people behind a film, exhibition or a painting when it is
done well, we do notice them and see their lack of ability or mistakes
when something is done badly. However my point is more that if the
stance of the projectionist, for example, can be adopted when
viewing a painting and maybe noticing beyond the main event to
instead look around a little, then something else can be opened up.
The film playing at present is Stefan Zeyen’s Farewell, for me a
beautiful example of what can happen when you examine and go in
close and how that can open up new possibilities, As the artists says
“The film image is continually scaled up in such a way that the
departing movement is completely neutralized and the protagonists
retain their original size. Because of the physical zoom into the film
material the image degrades continually. Film grain increases,
sharpness decreases, until the image gets completely absorbed in the
film material.” It is, for me inherently painterly, both from the
standpoint of making and the type of looking that I have been trying
to articulate. Like looking at a painting, it shows what is there
already, but also shows what can happen if you keeping looking, if
you start to look more intensely or from a different position or
perspective. We are left with an image that is both microscopic and
macroscopic. I think that looking at and using what is already there,
to then add to through combinations or additions, by isolating parts,
or by zooming in on a detail, and so on, allows for new and exciting
ways of looking. (detail) as an exhibition combined many ideas
around what and how it means to look at a painting, but ultimately
the adoption of a projectionist’s eye in looking at painting is the one
that I am most intrigued by and perhaps offers ground for further
thought. Maybe this correlates with Morley seeing new possibilities
after looking at paintings under a microscope, to try to “see through
and into.” This seems to be a good position for both the activity of
painting and looking at painting.
References
Mitchell, W T J, What do pictures want?, University of Chicago Press,
2005
Searle, A, Unbound, South Bank Centre, 1994
Verhagen, E, 2010, The Painting of Gerard Gasiorowski circa 1970: A
Comparative Reading, In Gerard Gasiorowski, ed. by Bonnet, F &
Mangion, E, 2010, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag
how is it for essays in books with harvard?
Lasker, J, Complete essays 1984-1998, Edgewise Press, 1998
Steeds, L, Exhibition, Whitechapel, 2014
Clark, K, One Hundred Details From the National Gallery, National
Gallery, 2008
Haldane, J B S, Possible Worlds, Chatto and Windus, 1930
Michelson, A, Kino Eye: The Xritings of Dziga Vertov, Pluto Press,
1984
Douglas, C, Transmitter / Receiver, Hayward Publishing, 2011
Beaumont Newhall, “Moving Pictures”; in The Cinematic, ed. David
Campany, (London, Whitechapel Publications, 2007)
Rosalind Krauss, 1997, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, London, MIT Press
Dorothea Von Hantlemann, “30 July 2010 – 22 October 2010”: in
Phillip Parreno: Films 1987-2010, eds. Karen Marta and Kathryn
Rattee, (London, Serpentine Gallery, 2010)