The painterly language arising from the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler finds itself describing gestures that behave ‘in-between’ constructed histories. Historic accumulated gestures by female painters and artists at seminal moments in history point towards spaces in which contemporary artists can speak about how new painting language can be formed, now. Using notions of liquidity from Giorgio Agamben and Luce Irigaray to think of a new painterly terminology. The field of making, the performance and transitive material visualizations of Frankenthaler’s practice makes space for the voices of female painters after her.
{"title":"Liquid gestures: The language of that land","authors":"Melissa Gordon","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00049_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00049_1","url":null,"abstract":"The painterly language arising from the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler finds itself describing gestures that behave ‘in-between’ constructed histories. Historic accumulated gestures by female painters and artists at seminal moments in history point towards spaces in which contemporary artists can speak about how new painting language can be formed, now. Using notions of liquidity from Giorgio Agamben and Luce Irigaray to think of a new painterly terminology. The field of making, the performance and transitive material visualizations of Frankenthaler’s practice makes space for the voices of female painters after her.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Originally presented as a talk at Turner Contemporary Margate in 2014 in association with the exhibition Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner , the article explores the importance of Helen Frankenthaler’s exposure to the work of Paul Cézanne in exhibitions in New York in the early 1950s for the making of her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea in 1952 and speculates about her engagement with the work of Nicolas Poussin in her painting Eden (1956).
{"title":"Helen Frankenthaler: Something new in terms of nature","authors":"Alison Rowley","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00047_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00047_1","url":null,"abstract":"Originally presented as a talk at Turner Contemporary Margate in 2014 in association with the exhibition Making Painting: Helen Frankenthaler and JMW Turner , the article explores the importance of Helen Frankenthaler’s exposure to the work of Paul Cézanne in exhibitions in New York in the early 1950s for the making of her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea in 1952 and speculates about her engagement with the work of Nicolas Poussin in her painting Eden (1956).","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136185945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When Helen Frankenthaler said ‘no rules’, everything was up for grabs: she would interrogate, disrupt or disregard conventions. While Frankenthaler had the perception to envision what she intended to make, for some artists that deterministic state of knowing can be elusive. The author reflects on Frankenthaler’s maxim ‘no rules’ and compares it to their personal experience of painting practice. This article explores the impact of a single decision on the direction and outcome of an artwork and investigates the balance between regulation and artistic intuition in the author’s painting. The article further explores the concept of artistic freedom and the paradox it presents. It suggests that many artists introduce problems or limitations to navigate the creative process. The author outlines their own artistic methodology which utilizes rules, algorithms and systems to navigate artistic decision-making and to create a dialectic tension between structure and artistic freedom.
{"title":"The bureaucracy of freedom","authors":"Katie Pratt","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00050_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00050_1","url":null,"abstract":"When Helen Frankenthaler said ‘no rules’, everything was up for grabs: she would interrogate, disrupt or disregard conventions. While Frankenthaler had the perception to envision what she intended to make, for some artists that deterministic state of knowing can be elusive. The author reflects on Frankenthaler’s maxim ‘no rules’ and compares it to their personal experience of painting practice. This article explores the impact of a single decision on the direction and outcome of an artwork and investigates the balance between regulation and artistic intuition in the author’s painting. The article further explores the concept of artistic freedom and the paradox it presents. It suggests that many artists introduce problems or limitations to navigate the creative process. The author outlines their own artistic methodology which utilizes rules, algorithms and systems to navigate artistic decision-making and to create a dialectic tension between structure and artistic freedom.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The long-term collaboration of Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, originally predicated on painting, extends to its studio management; conceptions of work-sharing; design of formats of presentation and exhibition strategy. This raises a question of how far the conception of ‘a painting’ could hold in a context where paintings’ contiguity with boundaries and processes is already a debate arising from variables explored through shared production. The positioning of painting as ‘installation’ further destabilizes the discreet objecthood of a painting resolved within a solidifying frame. Taking up a conception of fluid materiality as a metaphor for this instability, reference is made to both painting and feminist philosophy: Helen Frankenthaler’s development of a painterly language of fluid applications and Luce Irigaray’s terminology of ‘fluidity’ as a physical and discursive interrelation, based in a double experience of feminine physiology. Frankenthaler’s fluid paint and Irigaray’s poetics of fluidity, devised to imagine a non-hierarchical discourse, are contemporaneous but may have no historic connection. The term ‘fluid’, drawn from both these sources, will be used to read an imaginative and purposeful resistance to idealizing the authority of formal explanations of painting present within Cullinan Richards’s practice.
{"title":"Cullinan Richards: A visit to the studio, 9 December 2022, Painting Fluid Thinking1","authors":"Joan Key","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00051_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00051_1","url":null,"abstract":"The long-term collaboration of Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards, originally predicated on painting, extends to its studio management; conceptions of work-sharing; design of formats of presentation and exhibition strategy. This raises a question of how far the conception of ‘a painting’ could hold in a context where paintings’ contiguity with boundaries and processes is already a debate arising from variables explored through shared production. The positioning of painting as ‘installation’ further destabilizes the discreet objecthood of a painting resolved within a solidifying frame. Taking up a conception of fluid materiality as a metaphor for this instability, reference is made to both painting and feminist philosophy: Helen Frankenthaler’s development of a painterly language of fluid applications and Luce Irigaray’s terminology of ‘fluidity’ as a physical and discursive interrelation, based in a double experience of feminine physiology. Frankenthaler’s fluid paint and Irigaray’s poetics of fluidity, devised to imagine a non-hierarchical discourse, are contemporaneous but may have no historic connection. The term ‘fluid’, drawn from both these sources, will be used to read an imaginative and purposeful resistance to idealizing the authority of formal explanations of painting present within Cullinan Richards’s practice.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":"332 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Helen Frankenthaler was five days short of her thirteenth birthday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, causing the United States finally to enter the Second World War. She was 16 in August 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting an end to the war. Yet, despite the fact that Japan had been the Enemy, many Americans – including many American artists – became fascinated with Japan and its culture in the years following the war. This article details the particular importance of Japan in the creation of the works in the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty , at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, in 2021–22 – Frankenthaler’s extraordinary woodcuts.
{"title":"Frankenthaler, woodcuts and Japan","authors":"Suzanne Boorsch","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00048_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00048_1","url":null,"abstract":"Helen Frankenthaler was five days short of her thirteenth birthday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, on 7 December 1941, causing the United States finally to enter the Second World War. She was 16 in August 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting an end to the war. Yet, despite the fact that Japan had been the Enemy, many Americans – including many American artists – became fascinated with Japan and its culture in the years following the war. This article details the particular importance of Japan in the creation of the works in the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty , at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, in 2021–22 – Frankenthaler’s extraordinary woodcuts.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on the experimental painting process of Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975). It is informed by French postmodern theory, principles of colour theory, and includes algorithms developed by the artist himself. Thompson’s practice can be understood as a continuous rumination on technology and the history of technology, as the artist explained in several interviews for this text, which also describes how his themes since c.2006 have been transposed into elaborate practical processes. The concerns and sources for his interrelated sets and series of paintings are wide-ranging, from the relationship between photography, printing and painting, to the Modernist grid, square and monochromy; how labour and time can be measured and mapped; and the role of the artist’s gesture, chance, and the influence of capitalist forces in the production and distribution of art.
{"title":"Painting as technology: Toolpaths and pathways in Cheyney Thompson’s work","authors":"P. Gottschaller","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00025_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00025_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the experimental painting process of Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975). It is informed by French postmodern theory, principles of colour theory, and includes algorithms developed by the artist himself. Thompson’s practice can be understood as a continuous rumination\u0000 on technology and the history of technology, as the artist explained in several interviews for this text, which also describes how his themes since c.2006 have been transposed into elaborate practical processes. The concerns and sources for his interrelated sets and series of paintings\u0000 are wide-ranging, from the relationship between photography, printing and painting, to the Modernist grid, square and monochromy; how labour and time can be measured and mapped; and the role of the artist’s gesture, chance, and the influence of capitalist forces in the production and\u0000 distribution of art.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43021238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This experimental text considers the application of painting as a philosophical practice through an inquiry of what it actually means to have knowledge of an artwork. That is, what does it mean to think materially, in Hubert Damisch’s words, ‘what does it mean for a painter to think?’. Within this context emerges a dialogue between the cognitive, the analytic and the poetic, seeking to embody and offer a picture of the experience of the visible. This grows from an interest in the philosophy of perception, specifically engaging current approaches in embodied cognition and blending theory, considering vision and visual perception as an ontologic process. The text presented below seeks to explore the possibilities of carrying over this philosophical terrain to questions of received language, ideas of originality and problems of authorship. This is a painter’s task ‐ an approach to ‘text as image’ ‐ and is not only about devising and exploring a specific format to speak about how painting works but also about staging a compositional technique and textual act of re-production between experimental writing and the material practice of painting. Presenting unorthodox academic writing seeks to situate ideas not only within scholarship but also in how that scholarship might be transmitted effectively.
{"title":"Speculative scholarship: Between text and image","authors":"Christina Mamakos","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00027_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00027_1","url":null,"abstract":"This experimental text considers the application of painting as a philosophical practice through an inquiry of what it actually means to have knowledge of an artwork. That is, what does it mean to think materially, in Hubert Damisch’s words, ‘what does it mean for a painter\u0000 to think?’. Within this context emerges a dialogue between the cognitive, the analytic and the poetic, seeking to embody and offer a picture of the experience of the visible. This grows from an interest in the philosophy of perception, specifically engaging current approaches\u0000 in embodied cognition and blending theory, considering vision and visual perception as an ontologic process. The text presented below seeks to explore the possibilities of carrying over this philosophical terrain to questions of received language, ideas of originality and problems of authorship.\u0000 This is a painter’s task ‐ an approach to ‘text as image’ ‐ and is not only about devising and exploring a specific format to speak about how painting works but also about staging a compositional technique and textual act of re-production between experimental\u0000 writing and the material practice of painting. Presenting unorthodox academic writing seeks to situate ideas not only within scholarship but also in how that scholarship might be transmitted effectively.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43437415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawn towards Hong Kong because of what appears to be a thriving art market, many artists from the People’s Republic of China are now looking towards Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone created nearby in the 1980s, for conducting their practices. Launched as an economic testing ground by Deng Xiaping, Shenzhen is now experiencing new and profound changes. The development of new art institutions has been the reason for the emergence of an art scene that is fostering the creation of original art practices, especially in the field of painting. This article takes as example three practitioners and explains the reasons why they have chosen to live there and how they are negotiating their position from this city within the local art ecology as well as the art market of Hong Kong. The first of these artists, Liang Quan (), has lived in Shenzhen since the 1990s and is a representative of contemporary forms of literati painting, while the other two, Zhou Li () and Xue Feng (), are more recent arrivals who are both abstract painters engaging sometimes in the creation of installations and public art projects. To better understand the position of these artists towards the demands of an art market, this article will also explain how the idea of commoditization, which was so repellent to the practitioners of institutional critique in the Euro-American context of the 1960s and 1970s, has not been experienced in Mainland China in quite the same way.
{"title":"New frontier: Three painters from Shenzhen and their relation with the Hong Kong art market","authors":"F. Vigneron","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00030_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00030_1","url":null,"abstract":"Drawn towards Hong Kong because of what appears to be a thriving art market, many artists from the People’s Republic of China are now looking towards Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone created nearby in the 1980s, for conducting their practices. Launched as an economic testing\u0000 ground by Deng Xiaping, Shenzhen is now experiencing new and profound changes. The development of new art institutions has been the reason for the emergence of an art scene that is fostering the creation of original art practices, especially in the field of painting. This article takes as\u0000 example three practitioners and explains the reasons why they have chosen to live there and how they are negotiating their position from this city within the local art ecology as well as the art market of Hong Kong. The first of these artists, Liang Quan (), has lived in Shenzhen since the\u0000 1990s and is a representative of contemporary forms of literati painting, while the other two, Zhou Li () and Xue Feng (), are more recent arrivals who are both abstract painters engaging sometimes in the creation of installations and public art projects. To better understand the position\u0000 of these artists towards the demands of an art market, this article will also explain how the idea of commoditization, which was so repellent to the practitioners of institutional critique in the Euro-American context of the 1960s and 1970s, has not been experienced in Mainland China in quite\u0000 the same way.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44228249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
It is now understood that the two great defining points in the history of western painting ‐ the emergence of illusory space in the Quattrocento and its disavowal in the mid-twentieth century ‐ represent significant shifts in a perpetual tide in which pictorial space is re-invented. Outside of modernist teleology, the ‘abstract’ in painting is a malleable term, denoting a tendency, or a move away from, rather than a polemic against depiction. How productively, then, can notions of pictorial space be mapped between ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’? In this article, I focus on the work of the American painter Robert Ryman (1930‐2019). Ryman defined his work as ‘realist’ and deployed a materialism that foregrounded the processes of painting. His paintings are both disarmingly simple and spatially complex, and, despite his disavowal of illusion, this complexity is, paradoxically, concerned with the production of pictorial space. I bring together two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, to address the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings and to suggest that they enter into a negotiation with a perspective that is something very different to a rebuttal. To look at Ryman again in this way is to offer a rethinking of the paradoxical spaces of abstract painting, its past and its present.
{"title":"Nexus, veil: Robert Ryman and the equivocal spaces of abstraction","authors":"April Virgoe","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00031_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00031_1","url":null,"abstract":"It is now understood that the two great defining points in the history of western painting ‐ the emergence of illusory space in the Quattrocento and its disavowal in the mid-twentieth century ‐ represent significant shifts in a perpetual tide in which pictorial space is\u0000 re-invented. Outside of modernist teleology, the ‘abstract’ in painting is a malleable term, denoting a tendency, or a move away from, rather than a polemic against depiction. How productively, then, can notions of pictorial space be mapped between ‘abstraction’ and\u0000 ‘figuration’? In this article, I focus on the work of the American painter Robert Ryman (1930‐2019). Ryman defined his work as ‘realist’ and deployed a materialism that foregrounded the processes of painting. His paintings are both disarmingly simple and spatially\u0000 complex, and, despite his disavowal of illusion, this complexity is, paradoxically, concerned with the production of pictorial space. I bring together two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, to address\u0000 the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings and to suggest that they enter into a negotiation with a perspective that is something very different to a rebuttal. To look at Ryman again in this way is to offer a rethinking of the paradoxical spaces of abstract painting, its\u0000 past and its present.","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46471848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Avis Newman’s The Weight of Souls 1 : Studio M, Rochelle School, London, 10 June‐30 July 2021","authors":"J. Key","doi":"10.1386/jcp_00033_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jcp_00033_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40089,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Painting","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45507063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}