Detail from one of my recent painting series, “Angaris”
I recently found two statements about painting by Australian artist Helen Johnson that were very resonant for me. While Johnson’s work has identifiable content, her approach and attitudes are aligned with my work as a non representationalist.
First, her description of painting from a roundtable about painting in Frieze Magazine:
Painting is a space for the critical deployment of ambiguity, wit, failure and unknowing. Being a painter today doesn’t mean seeing painting as some kind of anachronistic refuge, or thinking that the modernist project of the medium can be rehabilitated, or even continue to be flogged. I am interested in the complexities, loadings and problems of painting as devices for producing meaning today, informed by a new range of conditions. I am not interested in using painting to defend itself, make statements or draw conclusions, but to open spaces for reflective thought, where a multiplicity of positions can be recognized, particularly as a means of resisting the imposition of a fixed narrative.
This passage is from Johnson’s artist statement which is so much better than most efforts in that category of writing about art that is often so tired and trite. I really like her directness and her awareness of contemporary contexts:
Painting serves as the primary ground of my practice, though the approaches I take seek an understanding of painting as a loaded medium operating on new terms in a post-medium condition…Painting is an interesting vehicle for me because it is loaded, neurotic, problematised, a market force, scattered, essentialised and recomplexified, loathed, able to operate simultaneously within and beyond itself, able to be beautiful and horrible at the same time. My approach to painting divagates from a grounding in figuration in search of a space of pluralism and openness, where the privilege of the subject becomes slippery. A gesture, alive in one painting, might be deadened through mechanised replication in the next…Construct and intuition ask questions of one another. The space of painting is for me a space where seemingly incontrovertible things are constantly being reconsidered, put into new relations with other things, where slippage is always present. In this regard it is a useful space for thought.
To me, this artist statement is typical of a sad part of the art world that through the complicated, supposedly sophisticated language in artists’ ‘statements’ manages to immediately dismiss about 95 percent of its possible audience. All I can think is that this dismissal and elitism is exactly what an artist who presents such statement is trying to do. And that is why it is sad.
I agree with Anna on this one….too esoteric to grasp logically. And I don’t mean that all must read logically but this is obtuse. I think of it as academic language born of the Art School and cultivated as a means to appear otherworldly and ‘elite’ as in museum quality.
I guess it is the way Johnson bumps up against that unknowingness that I respond to. I hear what you and Anna are saying–and I often have that response to “art speak” artist statements–but didn’t have that response to this one. The bottom line for me is that what happens in the process of making, whether a poem or a painting, is hard to describe. I keep trying, but it is hard, hard, hard. Thanks for your comment Ouida.
I’m with Agnes Martin; painting at its best is not an intellectual exercise. Inspiration is not a bunch of concepts, it comes through an openness to experience that our idea-full mind filters, distorts or ignores altogether. Too much language answers nothing.
Deb, this painting has such depth, its percolating. Love it!