TWO LANGUAGES
ROMANTIC CONCEPTUALISM
2007. Thesis text.
Images are works by Lee Lozano
In what follows, I shall be concerned with vocabularies in painting and Romantic Conceptualism, drawing on Sol LeWitt and Philip Guston, semiotics, vocabularies, intuition, associations and studio practice.
01 SEPT 06 Went to Drewex and inquired about canvases, which I’ve never bought or painted on previously. I bought twelve, painting onto them, almost schematically, the elements I’d put on my vocabulary list. I wanted a tool box, metaphorical tools that I could use in constructing images and “sentences” in the same way as building blocks are used in building construction = and so avoid having to feel my way back and forth in the studio in deciding what to paint.
10 SEPT 06: All paintings become precious and significant. I’m not capable of achieving the ideal distanced relationship to things that would allow me to juggle with these elements.
01 OCT 06: Continue working on the canvases, as though I could not afford to throw 60 kroner away on a canvas. Engage in studio conversations about them. Nina Roos comments that the colours are somewhat harsh. Olav Christopher Jenssen says that the video shop I’ve copied from Dan Attoe is the best. No one seems to notice that it is Dan Attoe.
05 OCT 06: I’ve found it irritating that no one shares my view that I am working with symbols of popular culture and mixing them. It’s obviously not that simple. What irritates me even more is that it means that I have to redefine what I’m doing.
10 FEB 07: Since I assume that I must begin by defining the idea in order to explain myself perfectly in writing or orally afterwards, the explanation is where the action is.
12 FEB 07: I’ve become interested in how other painters paint and how they understand their pictures.
16 FEB 07: I head off to the studio again. I’m so disgruntled that I’m simply oozing bad vibes. I know the horror of believing that you’re targeting absolutely the wrong level and totally missing the mark.
01 MAR 07: The idea of symbols that could be expressed verbally was not a success. Even though I am able to describe images with a degree of precision, images and words belong to different dimensions or leagues. More promising was space that opened up once I’d dropped text and explanation and the metaphor idea involving the pictures. I had thought it a smart idea, but it’s neither fun nor effective.
02 MAR 07: Previously when I talked with artists, which I do all the time, about modes of art production and prerequisites and preparation and so on I became envious of myself, talking about the creation of a coherent and functional platform which was also flexible.
At first my interest in systems came from my interest in literature. I was interested in the writings of Raymond Roussel, and the way that kind of systematic approach freed you from being too involved in the subject matter of the work and allowed you to
develop artworks without having to get so involved in personal interests. I
liked Roussel because of his word games. He could write a whole novel full of
incredible detail, completely exotic and amazing, and yet it wasn't some kind
of personal exploration. There was plenty of room within there to free-associate,
but there was also plenty of room to use things that were quite
alien to you.
- Mike Kelley
SOL LEWITT AND PHILIP GUSTON
During my first year at the Art Academy I took out lots of books about artists from the Academy Library. Two, for me, seminal developments were that I discovered the rhetoric in Mike Kelley’s works and began to have a thing about Conceptual art. It was highly disagreeable to learn that Conceptual art already existed and it took me three years to digest that discovery. I had written and thought about the connections between art and symbolic systems, and Kosuth’s elegant and cool explanations were a sign that the joy of developing Conceptual art myself was not to be.
I had my doubts about how the dry illustrated linguistics course was going to connect up with pictorial art with its lyrical and semiotic qualities, which was the only sort I thought existed.
Over the following three years I analyzed painting through photos, installations and paintings.
My trauma was the result of a misunderstanding: I didn’t think that Conceptual art could draw conclusions that were unattainable by logical means. This seemed to imply that I could no longer articulate lyrical or humorous conclusions, and that was what I was interested in: to produce meaning in other than academically sanctioned ways.
Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable. In terms of idea the artist is free to even surprise herself. Ideas are discovered by intuition.
- Sol LeWitt
Both LeWitt and the painter Philip Guston were living in New York in the 1960s. LeWitt was not part of Guston’s circle of established expressionists and nor did Guston belong to LeWitt’s young experimental crowd. The artistic manifestos and inventions of both emerged, however, in a reaction against a commodifed and formalistic art scene and against the political climate pervading the USA in the 60s. It was a period marked by political corruption and warfare and by the struggle for social liberation across race and gender. In 1967, Sol LeWitt wrote his Paragraphs on Conceptual art, formulating new premises for art.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements. - Sol LeWitt
Philip Guston was 57 years of age when, in 1970, he showed the now so well-known figurative paintings for the first time. At that point he had been an abstract expressionist for 20 years. He was a member of a group of influential American abstract painters whose champion was the critic Clement Greenberg.
He felt the absence of a correlation between the social and political realities in his own practice – thinking it absurd to be pondering pictures from the terrible war in Vietnam one minute and then be engaged in adjusting a red to a blue in an abstract painting the next. This led to a crisis of conscience and deep unease.
Guston’s figures began life as political caricatures of corrupt Americans. The ”Poor Richard” drawings show a Richard Nixon whose corruption bursts the confines of the mind and writes itself all over his face and body. He and his henchmen frequently resort to wearing Ku Klux Klansmen’s masks in futile attempts to hide their deformity in the later paintings.
When criticized for the impurity of his later paintings, he said:
There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no wiggly or straight lines...
Edge of Town of 1969 shows two Klansmen cruising against a backdrop assumed to be a Barnett Newman ”zip” painting. The backdrops against which several of the paintings from his early period as a figurative painter unfold contain references to paintings by well-known modernists. Rather like tagging today, they lay claim to an area.
Philip Guston has a vocabulary of forms, a cluster of subjects, that he uses in a variety of combinations. The most prominent motifs are Ku Klux Klan hoods, a paintbrush, feet, shoes, a pointing hand, an easel and a bell. While the elements he paints appear as symbols, they have no universal significance or meanings that are generally accepted. Consequently, they do not qualify as symbols in the linguistic sense of the term, namely, as conventional representations of concepts.
But they establish themselves as personal symbols through repetition, style and multiple variations on the same elements. A close study of Guston’s work reveals that the hoods conceal and are metonyms for corrupt faces. The shoes and the brush are images culled from the painter’s everyday life. The people driving cars are corrupt Americans on their way to pull yet another con trick.
SEMIOTICS, SYMBOLS AND VOCABULARIES
Now that I can use images too, it is like having two languages. In essence my idea is that, at its best, this combination will achieve greater precision than words or images separately.
MAR 07: Few words are more tired today than the term subversive. Munch was subversive in the 1890s. I think subversive is an expression for aggressive inspiration. I have produced a quick list:
Painter roles, edit # prejudices.
1. coarse macho brainbox
2. sweet charming artist who’s sexy and who invests her works with a tang of cunt
3. complaining, weary lady artist
4. disgruntled, sceptical, bitter, martyr-type male artist
5. rich painter who mostly hangs out with collectors
6. ‘slacker’ painter in America
7. ‘slacker’ painter who’s part of the popular culture mill in Norway
8. Danish crazy painter who drinks beer and smokes
9. painter who paints large surfaces
10. ex-graffiti artist
11. ex-skater painter
12. painter from Northern Norway with no distance to the history of painting, who gets furious if you talk about painting from other perspectives than his
13. conceptualist smart lady painter
14. lee lozano. A rough who’s neither a sweet and sexy painter nor an abstract psychodrama painter
A symbol, in its basic sense, is a conventional representation of a concept; i.e., an idea, object, quality, quantity, etc. In more psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic in nature, and representations for these concepts are simply token artifacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning, or symbolism.
Semiotics studies symbols and symbol systems in general.
A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language.
The vocabulary of a person is defined either as the set of all words that are understood by that person or the set of all words likely to be used by that person when constructing new sentences.
My desire to call elements symbols in the linguistic sense proves untenable; it would entail all signs becoming symbols. The shoes, canvas and paintbrush simply look like symbols. Given the fund of associations and images that form in my mind when I see Guston’s works, they figure as symbols for me.
Such innovation can emerge in art, music and literature because the quality of the art product is not determined by the satisfaction of conventional and academic criteria. However, the sciences can provide conceptual tools and building bricks. (A further reason for innovation in art is, of course, the relative absence of capital in the one-person outfit that artists invariably are). This means that I can abandon the idea of calling Guston’s elements symbols without losing the right to claim that they have meanings. The distinctive (and problematic) prerogative of pictorial art, its artistic freedom, means that the artist can elaborate freely on conventions and, for instance, base an entire practice on fantasy images.
This special prerogative rests upon that which, since Duchamp, has underpinned all art: subjectivity.
NOV 06: It’s tempting to think the activity of painting as that of speaking in a specific vocabulary. This implies a granting of parity to verbal and pictorial languages with zero friction between them. It could have been great. But it’s apparently not that easy.
NOV 06: The vocabulary idea doesn’t work in practice. There’s nothing interest-grabbing in painting ideas about the composition of forms; nor does it work functionally. Only the thought of it is intriguing. None would disagree with the idea, but none would agree on the visual solutions.
JAN 07: For a painter, it is somehow futile to articulate a vocabulary; afterall, noone will accepted it as a conventional set of signs. Still, it is central in developing a language within the chosen imagery. This simply is a wacky but perfectly righ activity.
FEB 07: I am more interested in my own interpretations of a work I like than in how the artist arrived at the idea for it.
MAR 07: I am more interested in how the artist arrived at the idea for the work than in my own interpretations.
Just as the notion of symbols defined linguistically cannot be applied directly to Philip Guston’s works, nor can the concept of a vocabulary. As concepts, however, they are integral to the understanding of his paintings and to that of many other paintings as well. I think this is due to the fact that that I acquired concepts and understanding in the academic tradition of learning before learning anything about painting. The result is that an understanding of painting and my painting practice evolves in close association with language.
Mike Kelley describes the friction between an idea and its execution in an interview available on Ubuweb. He says of the creation of Plato´s Cave that
That particular work started with the issue of the possessive, but once it
got rolling I just gave that whole thing up. I didn't even expand on it. And
the work became more about developing the themes textually. But a lot of
that development was quite formal as well, arising out of various researches
into all these various themes. I would write on each subject, and then I
would weave them together based on language association and image
association, things like that. It became more a process of developing a text.
INTUITION
” Du ligg ikkje med nesa mot bakken når du har fått smaken av fugl”
(‘You don’t lie with your nose in the hill once you’ve known the taste of fowl.’) - Arild Edvardsen
FEB 07: The joy of discovering a truism. I really love it when painters say “it works” with precise particularity, and are right. What is that based on?
FEB 07: Intuitive choices are more precise than reflective choices because intuitions are what slip from the subconscious to the conscious mind. They are problematic and we are unaccustomed to relying on them. The reason for this lies in the structures underpinning knowledge production outside of art: academic learning disallows intuitive choices. Despite being as deeply ingrained in me as the aspiration to be an artist, these structures must be unlearned. I am frequently struck by a solution or an idea that appears to be a random impulse but which is in fact something that I have long been mulling over.
"It is only by means of vast quantities of knowledge, of training, of manual dexterity that you can move freely and elegantly in writing, or in art, for that matter." - Hans Petter Blad
”According to Dr Charcot and his successors, and according to Western philosophy since Descartes, language organizes the self. This is what underlies the widespread idea of the priority of the word over the image.
[B]y offering resistance to mental images, those that are sometimes called illusions, the visual arts offer an understanding of the connections between the self and a world that operates with a kind of exactitude that is different from that of language. This means that the instruments that are designed for thought, like philosophy or more specifically logic, are not usable except in an analogous sense.
Since perception, vision, is overwhelmingly linked to theories about how consciousness works, and most specifically to thinking, pictorial art is again, indirectly, linked with language and its means of acquiring insight.
All experience that is inaccessible to language but which operates in consciousness is normally called intuition. An intuitive choice is thus not as conscious as a thought-out choice – it simply uses aspects of consciousness that elude verbal expression.
ASSOCIATIONS
”The procedure of montage is therefore one in which all allegorical principles are executed simultaneously: appropriation and depletion of meaning, fragmentation and dialectical juxtaposition of fragments, and the systematic separation of signifier and signified. In the sense of Walter Benjamin’s definition of the allegorical one could say that the allegorical mind arbitrarily selects from the vast and disordered material that a person’s knowledge has to offer. It tries to match one piece with another to figure out whether the pieces can be combined: this meaning with that image, or that image with this meaning. The result is never predictable since the is no organic mediation between the two.
FEB 07: Associations are just as precise as intuitions.
FEB 07: I have bought a Fischli & Weiss book simply in order to have a fine print of
”Mausi is pissed”, one of my favourite images. It offers an economical model of a thought sequence and therein lies its success.
Smiles are a staple. A smile is key capital if you’re a girl and sweet, and you’re sweet if you smile, and being sweet allows you to get a foot in the door, and then being smart counts for less. Nice and smart is clearly a killer-combo but nice and sexy is OK too. I prefer it not to be obvious whether paintings are the work of a guy or a woman.
Det er den draumen
Det er den draumen me ber på
at noko vedunderleg skal skje,
at det må skje –
at tidi skal opna seg
at hjarta skal opna seg
at dører skal opna seg
at berget skal opna seg
at kjeldor skal springa –
at draumen skal opna seg,
at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn
på ein våg me ikkje har visst um
It’s the Dream
It’s the dream we carry in secret
that something miraculous will happen
that it must happen –
that time will open
that the heart will open
that doors will open
that the mountains will open
that springs will gush
that the dream will open
that one morning we will glide into
some harbour we didn’t know was there]
Associations lead to works. They are entertaining and frequently cryptic imaginary pictures, like immaterial collages. Associations lubricate thought. Like intuitions, associations can give precise impetus. Frequently, protracted thought and analysis concludes in the same mind-image or fantasy picture that triggered it.
However, if one subscribed to the use of association and intuition 100 per cent in visual art, it would be impossible to discuss art’s quality or content. It was not, for instance, possible to discuss the quality of his works with Edvard Munch. This conception of the artist’s role – the genius figure, is as antiquated as it is influential among young artists today. Why should anyone be an artist if s/he didn’t think s/he had something special to offer?
ROMANTIC CONCEPTUALISM
My idea is to constellate impulses within a set of premises: a structure.
Romanticism is ostensibly incompatible with conceptualism.
Since the 1960s, Conceptual art has been both criticized and praised for its unemotional, illustrative, intellectual, analytical and highly sophisticated features.
Was Sol LeWitt right when he commented that an 'emotional kick' in an artwork would deter the viewer from perceiving the conceptual?
Conceptualism – the word is repeated ad tedium – is something all artists relate to today because Conceptual art has become a paradigm. Which is to say that it represents a new dimension in art history and that after its arrival on the scene, the context within which artists work includes that experience.
Whereas Romanticism arose as a reaction against the Enlightenment and industrialization, conceptualism emerged in a reaction against commodification, formalism, capitalism and war. Romanticism stresses high emotion rather than reason and intellect and glorifies sentiment, imagination and free forms.
Sol LeWitt’s Conceptual art dispenses with process. Process is often associated with Romanticism but is not really in focus there either. The Romantic elements in Sol LeWitt’s conceptualism include the use of intuition and irrationality – what Romanticism would call feeling. LeWitt transfers this feeling to the idea. The result is an idea that the artist subsequently realizes, and which anyone could realize.
Philip Guston, who is credited with introducing postmodern painting, incorporated a couple of Romantic features into his work. Among other things, he stressed what he termed “raw feeling”. If we are to enrol Guston in Romanticism, it would have to be as a trash romantic.
For those of us who grew up in the 1980s, the animation of colourful inanimate industrial products seems somehow natural.
That is perhaps why Guston’s late style hits the spot for many young artists today: the cool sentimental seriality and elevation of a bunch of largely inanimate elements is one we´re naturally at home with and consider an adequate expression of emotional and intellectual perception.
What have a tree stump, a CD, colourful hair rubber bands, Böcklins Isle of the Dead, post-it notes, an open jaw, beads, Sun Ra, a pair of 3D glasses, tennis socks, a low-res Jpeg of Robert Musil, a brick wall, a romantic-style cloud, a stump, a stage set for a Öyvind Fahlström performance, Hertevig’s chickweed wintergreen and a rainbow in common?
In artist circles, process is discussed to within an inch of its life: you get the impression that if your process lacks intrinsic interest, you’re flawed as an artist.
Does the idea really serve as a substitute for process?
Apart from the fact that the process unfolds the idea, the idea needs to have a well-functioning form. It takes practice to represent the idea in the form. It is through that exercise – in other words through the process – that the artistic style emerges.
The style subsequently becomes a signature expression for both artist and idea and, concomitantly, the style or the form becomes part of the idea as an incarnation or symbol.
True, style can be imitated in varying degrees: Mike Kelley’s style, for instance, has visibly influenced many artists. And in terms of influence, there is an interesting and important distinction between art and fashion. In a nutshell, fashion is idea by way of style, while art and conceptualism is style by way of idea. Dyed-in-the-wool Conceptual artists claim to be completely uninterested in style, but I’ve yet to see a work to which form and style are immaterial.
Alternatively, if the process substitutes for the idea, you can imagine coming to the studio with your mind a complete blank and simply starting work.
The value of the process is primarily its role in stimulating concentration around the idea – it’s an idea forum.
The question that ultimately presents itself concerns the genesis of an idea and its origins.
Guston, for instance, got his ideas from moral and social scruples.
Kelley got some of his through his frustration over, and scepticism about, the ways in which the educational system produces and reproduces knowledge.
Rosalind Krauss’s comment on Sol LeWitt's conceptualism and form is one that I think neatly encapsulates brilliance in the representation of ideas:
”The object of thought is entirely contained within the brilliance of the routine. It is like music-hall performers doing a spectacular turn, switching hats from one head to another at lightning speed. No one thinks of the hat as the idea; it is simply a pretext for a display of skills. This is the sensation of being suspended before the immense spectacle of the irrational.”
Marianne Hurum 2007