The names of colors are stories in themselves. There is poetry in “burnt sienna”, “royal blue” or “payne’s gray”. The names of colors are also tied to subjectivity, perspective, and even something as banal as branding. The paint samples at your local hardware stores are filled with pseudo-literary titles for hues that range from the mundane to the sublime. The great irony of names for color is that everyone conceives of a specific hue as uniquely as we conceive of love or experience the taste of a peach.

It is true that colors play on our emotions. We experience different sensations with different juxtapositions. But what about the names? Does a name sway us? For a painter, colors are both fetish objects to adore and the very elements of the art of putting paint to a surface. For conceptual artists as varied as Yves Klein or Gilbert and George, color can be suffused with symbolic power (International Yves Klein Blue or the gold of the performance “The Singing Sculpture”).

There is mystery and poetry in the relationship between language and color. There is no limit to the historical and political implications of this relationship. Politicians wear their predictable dark blue suits and the environmentalist clothes himself in the green of photosynthesis.

William Earl Kofmehl III’s recent exhibition, “Dear Father Kickerbocker, I Just Googled You”, that inaugurated the new space Lombard-Freid Projects camouflaged the gravity of the wild under the cover of play. More specifically, the show – an exercise in boyish (as in boy scout) playful wonder in the wild – dramatized the urban – rural divide as represented in the peculiar presence of the squirrel. The exhibition consisted of four principal elements: a suite of embroideries on canvas, a large-scale hollow (approximately 12’ high by 16’ long) plywood squirrel sculpture, a bronze full-scale statue of the artists sitting on a wooden park bench interacting with a handful of other life-size bronze squirrels, and an opening night performance (or anti-performance) of Kofmehl and various accomplices situated within the plywood sculpture. The performance also included two individuals outside the Trojan squirrel, one signing at random and the other reciting texts from an open laptop.

Kofmehl’s work, here and in recent shows, continues its exploration and exposition of the boyhood. The boyhood here is a love of other boys and boyhoodship itself. This boyish love is not based on sexuality but rather on shared boyishness. By boyishness I am referring to the acts of innocent play and silliness that are commonly associated with kids in their teens: inside jokes, secret handshakes, and creating one’s own world of referents that can then be exploited for laughs and tapped for self-referential drama. Kofmehl’s meditations on the boyhood can be seen as a meditation on, or a reflection of, the inherent youth-obsessed nature of contemporary art. But this perspective would be misguided as the artist concerns himself more with the friendship among boys/men than with any underlying critique of contemporary art’s homoerotic boy obsession

Ultimately, Dear Father Knickerbocker is also a blind countenancing of the loss of the boyhood and the approaching calls to the manship that are the rites of passage for all who must leave home to mature. The dissipation of innocence, as a casualty of maturity into the manshiphood underlies much of the artist’s work on a subconscious level, particularly as it pertains to the transfer from asexual boy to sexual man.

The innocence of which I speak is the freedom not to long for a woman (or another man) and the freedom from responsibility- be it artistic, moral, or sexual. It is the freedom of being unencumbered by even the knowledge or articulation of sexual longing and its pull. This is also an innocence that comes with the freedom to be a boy  and play even when one has already reached the physical age of the manshiphood. Quite apart from, or in contrast to, the pathetic immaturity and awkwardness that characterize Judd Apatow movies, for example, Kofmehl’s study of the boyhood ventures into ancient Greek terrain in that resuscitates love among boys into the Platonic notion of agape, a love among fellow (boy)friends into something both silly and sacrosanct that is devoid of sexuality and whose nature is playful and filled with an implied, if not articulated, respect.

Our culture is far too quick, almost desperate and trigger-happy to assert sexual tendencies or tastes into human relations, be they between men and women or between men. When we see two men behaving kindly, warmly, affectionately with each other in a film or TV show it is almost always assumed that they are gay lovers or that there is some undercurrent of homo-eroticism at play. True, deep, compassionate friendship, love based on respect and Platonic ideals, is almost never depicted in the popular imagination. This largely under-explored landscape is precisely the terrain upon which Kofmehl’s playfulness and explorations of the boyhood, and consequently, Dear Father Kinckerbocker, unfold.

In the case of his show and performance, this love is demonstrated by the boyish gang at play in and around the squirrel, and it becomes the ancient Christian notion of agape, a love that is between friends, and between humans and animals, and is transmogrified into wood and bronze. The play between wood and bronze, two materials whose polar opposite relationship to fire represents the contrast between youth and maturity and is characteristic of Kofmehl’s work. Where wood is destroyed by fire, bronze cannot emerge without it. The materials exemplify the leap from the boyhood to the manship. In the artist’s work, this leap is a gaping void of femininity, a leap over and away from the womanhood or the girlhood. More specifically, the void identifies the absence of woman in Kofmhel’s work. The absence or almost invisibility of the female body or aura in “Dear Father Knickerbocker”, as well as in nearly all of the artist’s previous performances, amounts to a world of monastic boyish play and is a common enough element of boyish relations.

This chasm is the unspoken concealment in the artist’s entire oeuvre and a curious element when one considers the importance three older sisters (the artist’s only siblings) and his mother have played, and continue to play in his life.[1]

But what about the squirrel? What is role does this curious creature play in the work at questions. The answer lies in the role the squirrel plays in the relationship between man and the animal kingdom. An examination of the video loop of the artist interacting with Bernhard Goetz elaborates on this question and raises others. I write “Bernhard Goetz” with the assumption that he is known, a celebrity or a famous person with his own background narrative. In choosing to write his name rather than treating him as an anonymous player as I treat the others in Kofmehl’s performance (who in fact play a much greater role in the execution of the piece than does Goetz himself) I am addressing Goetz’s notoriety implicitly

Goetz’s presence in the video piece and in the opening night performance is camouflaged by the squirrel. The squirrel represents a good cover for the artist since Goetz breeds and trains them as his personal pets and Kofmehl treats this aspect of Goetz’s life as the subject, or at least backdrop of his performance, and indeed, the entire show.[2] Here, Kofmehl is channeling Joseph Beuys when he makes of the squirrel an animal symbol of boyhood fascination in much the same way Beuys made the buck a symbol of male virility and pro-creation. The sight of two grown men playing with squirrels on a park bench, as seen in the video loop, elicits suggestions of absurdity, of innocence and perversity all at once. The squirrel is that rare urbanized animal still somewhat caught between tame and wild but always seeming to lead a life impervious to the impact and concerns of the human. Boys hunt squirrels for fun, here, Kofmehl is a young man channeling his inner boy while he plays with squirrels and giggles with Goetz. The effect is disturbing, almost chilling and one has to question the authenticity of the encounter and the motives at play, be they ironic or innocent. In this video piece, two grown men become boys in their seeming loss of self-consciousness and their silly or playful interaction with these animals caught in the purgatory between the freedom of the wild and domesticity of pethood.

A boy becomes a man when he must concern himself with the well-being of others as much as, if not more than, his own. A man conjures gravity by nature, a boy levity. A man becomes a hero when he risks his life for a higher good. Perhaps this is the central phenomenological question to be reckoned with in “Dear Father Knickerbocker” and contemporary art in general. With so much of contemporary art seen in the galleries of New York and elsewhere made by people in their twenties it is hard to escape the two faces of youth: optimism and immaturity.

That contemporary art is ageist is obvious and a sign of the very fear of death suffered by collectors and curators, or at least their worship of youth, the flip side of the same coin. That this ageism can be critiqued, torn open to reveal a decadence and fear of living, is beside the point. The issue at hand is the psychological or existential position of the vast majority of these babes in the woods producing work whose limitations are glaringly obvious, like the sexual ministrations of a 15 year-old, despairingly awkward, however earnest.

Overwhelmingly, today’s young artists are perpetually childish, weak, feeble, and hackneyed. That these qualities are over-looked or celebrated in some cases, speaks volumes about the void in art criticism. Today’s artists know nothing the true struggle of a man, or, if they do, they choose to repress it or turn it into some tongue-in-cheek ironic gimmick in a half-hearted attempt to avoid countenancing their demons. Today’s art lacks evidence of intensity, hardship, adversity, and other tests of will. The result is cynical, weak, and feeble work, which largely explains the irrelevance of contemporary art within a larger cultural context. Art is play, boyish play, childish play at the expense of the manshiphood. The art of woman or the womanhood is a topic for further investigation, not entirely relevant to Kofmehl’s work.

In this boyhood realm Art is all-too-often lame, ironic, cowardly and devoid of any true gravity. It is this way because it lacks the moral maturity to countenance the horrors of our contemporary existence: environmental havoc, global warming, rampant corporatist oligarchy, expansion of inequality, globalist disenfranchisement, and much more. That not a single memorable work of contemporary visual art was produced in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001, is a testament to contemporary art’s fallowness.

This strife between play and work, between levity and gravity is one that takes a central role in the work of William Earl Kofmehl III. Kofmehl, now 30, is still pondering the role of the boyhood at the expense of the manshiphood. The artist’s boy perpetually reveals itself as it conceals the man ready to emerge within his work. Like the Trojan horse that concealed the Greek warriors in the days of Odysseos and Achilles, Kofmehl’s Trojan squirrel conceals the play of art boys, boys like scouts ready to emerge from the woodlands of their youth out into the battle of the manship.

It is a rare event when an artist fuses disparate media into one cohesive concept and exhibition. It is rarer still when that exhibition engages the politics and history of a people without being ironic, pseudo-clever, or pedantic. Such was the moment for William Earl Kofmehl III at his Lombard-Freid show and performances that took place from December, 2007 to January, 2008. A disclaimer: The artist and I both attended Carnegie Mellon University from 1998 to 2001.

The title of the show, “Lesson 43: Queue”, as well as the publicity photo of the artist posing in a mock formal group portrait with his father and two brothers-in-law, each of whom played key roles in the opening night performance, give clues to the cryptic and varied nature of Kofmehl’s work. To begin with, the artist opened the exhibition with a customary consecration of sorts: a performance that maps out the world, or in this case, the region and conceptual context for the sculptural and video elements: Central America and learning. The performance consisted of a variety of simultaneously-occuring gestures and actions including a lecture on language by the artist’s red-bearded father and the washing of the artists long red-hair by one of the brothers-in-law.

The works, ranging from cast bronze fish, bird, and boomerang wall pieces to rayon embroidery to video, were installed in an environment-like settingthat included a black wall with windows that partitioned the gallery into two spaces: the open public space and the interior closed private space in which the performance took place. The viewers were sealed off from the action but were afforded views through the windows thus creating a voyeuristic element that conjured up a number of colonial and subject-object oppositions whose relationship to the sculptural works in the gallery is equally paradigmatic.

The private performance space served as a fictional nativist studio wherein the “products” were fabricated and exhibited complete with spotlighting for easy consumption – another echo of the production-consumption dynamic between the United States and Central American countries

Perhaps the key semiotic component of “Lesson 43: Queue” is “Quetzal In Space,” a 2007 rayon embroidery made up of a depiction of the planet earth on a black ground accompanied by a boomerang, a coyote, a quetzal, an owl, and an American flag, all overly-large and ominously hovering over the blue and green planet. The work functions as a cipher to the mysterious gestures and cryptic analogies played out between the elements of the exhibition and makes a playful, somewhat faux innocent testimony on the history of white colonialism in Central America, the poaching and fetishization of wildlife such as the quetzal, and the more recent tortured history of American involvement in the region. Ironically – intentional or not – the work embodies these tensions in that it was commissioned by the artist for local women who excel at the art of embroidery, thus duplicating or raising to the second power, the dynamic between wealthy and more powerful outsider and nativist exoticism.

Whatever the geo-political and ramifications of the work, William Earl Kofmehl III proves his deftness at the playful and mysterious manipulation of complex issues all while demonstrating his manual and psychic dexterity as a sculptor and performer. His range of media (video, performance, sculpture, embroidery, and photography) and his range of materials (bronze, fabric, marble and wood) testify to the scope of the artist’s ambitions and multitudinous approaches to his work. These abilities testify to the uniqueness of his project as an artist and the sophistication of his contributions to contemporary art, a fact particularly impressive considering his young age: 27 at the time of the exhibition.

First Presented at the College Art Association Conference, New York, 2007

A Cynic is a spy who aims to discover what things are friendly or hostile to man; after making accurate observations, he then comes back and reports the truth.
-Epictetus (55 – 135 C.E.)

The Surface: Warhol’s Victory
Ladies, Gentlemen. Artists and Academics:

Let me begin by speaking about the wound…
Or, more precisely: the social/aesthetic disease from which the creative wound today originates: Cynical Irony.

You see it in the desperation of the gallery director. You see it in the dissimulation of the museum curator. You see it in the artist’s nervous laugh.

This contagious disease is so widespread, so common and such an obvious part of contemporary art’s character, that it rarely, if ever, is identified, let alone called into question as an impediment to experiencing contemporary art as an enhanced and enlightening phenomenon with any greater political or cultural relevance beyond the academic and the gallery circuits.

We now live in times where the practice of contemporary art making has devolved further and further into a cynical hyper-capitalist production at the service of contemporary art’s gamekeepers: dealers, consumers, and critics for whom art is a quasi-intellectual ego-driven game, a monopoly 2.0: the simulacrum version. This devolution is characterized by a designy aesthetics of decadence, where passively inherited cynical irony is necessarily encoded in the nature, intent, packaging and reception of work by artists who wish to enter into this system of self-negation, of aesthetic, moral, ethical, and political nullity in the hopes of attaining some greater profit or celebrity as a result of their play in the game.

The value of contemporary art is nothing, both in terms of its relevance to other spheres: political, cultural, social, intellectual; and in terms of what lies behind or beneath its operating systems. Indeed, valuelessness characterizes art’s practices because of its distance from the real, the events of our time. Contemporary art’s value is beyond capitalism, to the point that it’s nullity becomes its sole capital. The nullity is exchanged in a zero-sum form of insider trading even though art denies this nullity because to do so would propagate a crash of its entire symbolic-capital economy.

This reduction of art to a zero-sum, or more precisely, a zero-value game results in a decadent intellectual and emotional condition where irony is the safe escape route away from engagement, from meaning, and hence, relevance. Irony becomes the psycho-political language or playing field in which artists, dealers, and critics – the game’s participants – vie. This consensual hallucination of the ironic being taken for the real, this cynical simulacrum is the fundamental rule of the game.

I use the term “cynical” here in its modern sense. I employ it as a colloquial concept far outside the shadow of its origin. The cynicism of the Greeks, of Diogenes and Socrates, for whom cynicism was an uncompromising questioning for a life of virtue, a questioning rooted in an affirmation, an embrace at the service of discovery concerning the essence of human existence, often at the expense of ruling elites and norms. Cynicism as a mode of thinking is a paradigm that has suffered greatly in the evolution of occidental art history. The first cynics were uncompromising un-maskers who pierced the surfaces of power, of hypocrisy, so that they could lead lives of simplicity and independence free of falsehood and its material trappings.

Today, the “cynical” has become synonymous with pessimism, with false consciousness, with escapism and apathy. It is the defining stance of not only contemporary art, but of our new globalist era: crass materialism, shallowness, transparency, economic speculation, extreme self-consciousness, competition-aggression, vacuous celebrity worship, and the paroxystic addiction to perpetually recurring gratification. Cynicism has devolved into its own unique version of nothingness.

Irony has now become the neo-conservatism or implicit philosophical condition of intellectual/aesthetic elites. Witness the knee-jerk responses to artists, film-makers, musicians and other creators who attempt work of drama, emotional weight, angst, joy, or any other experiences outside the realm of the emotionally stunted and intellectually safe zones of the ironic codes. Cries of “sentimental” or “corny” or “romantic” are jettisoned in much the same cowardly and knee-jerk manner that the Republican Party has managed to demonize the term “liberal” and turn it into a dirty word for its own evil perversion of a word rooted in the idea of freedom. Today’s artists, young art students in particular, are simply incapable of expressing or countenancing the human experience, art or otherwise, without some sort of self-referential or self-reflexive pause: to investigate the possible ironic or humorous angle. In other words, all experience is subsumed to its attributed semiotic surroundings, which are, by nature, for the cynical ironist, always meta-narratives filled with either “overly-romantic” sentiments or are simply dismissed as “out of date”, “passé”, or “uncool”. The cynical ironist is nothing, if not, cool. Andy Warhol has won. Feelings, authentic experience, drama, passion, life and death are not cool anymore. There is no place for them in most contemporary art discourses. They are just things, words or ideas that happen to others elsewhere or in the past. The American invasion of Iraq and its resulting chaos, loss of life, and murders of tens of thousands of innocent people barely registers in the imagination of today’s artists. Witness the intellectual bankruptcy and silence of the majority of American artists since the horrific events of September 11, 2001.

Jean Baudrillard’s critique of contemporary art and its relationship to the banal, to the real, in “The Conspiracy of Art” touches on this nullity:

As long as art was making use of its own disappearance and the disappearance of its object, it still was a major enterprise. But art trying to recycle itself indefinitely by storming reality? The majority of contemporary art has attempted to do precisely that by confiscating banality, waste and mediocrity as values and ideologies. These countless installations and performances are merely compromising with the state of things, and with all the past forms of art history. Raising, originality, banality, and nullity to the level of values or even to perverse aesthetic pleasure. Of course, all of this mediocrity claims to transcend itself by moving art to a second, ironic level. But it is just as empty and insignificant on the second as on the first. The passage to the aesthetic level salvages nothing; on the contrary, it is mediocrity squared. It claims to be null—“I am null! I am null!” — and it truly is null.¹

This “nothing” (nihil) becomes the grounding value in what appears to be our pluralist art period of divergent narratives and stylistic trends. But this seeming pluralism is largely a superficial one, or more precisely, a pluralism of the superficies, the surface. What underlies the surface of pluralism is the given of irony and its many avatars: “bad painting”, vector painting, the absence of emotional engagement, corporatist design aesthetics, technological/academic fetishism, the erasure of the artist’s hand where all touches are mediated by flat applications of color, and a cynical “fuck you” to the eye of the viewer, – in other words negation negation, negation, or perhaps more precisely: avoidance, avoidance, avoidance.

Cloudy Territory
The work of the Belgian (Flemish) painter Luc Tuymans, arguably the most influential contemporary painter after Gerhard Richter (witness his many imitators, particularly in Europe), while highly inventive and mysteriously sophisticated, negotiates a complex and sometimes compromising relationship between the banal and the sublime, between the elusive and the intricately simple, between history and memory; and is an example of an instrumental and politicized engagement of irony as a tactical method designed to elevate the sublime into a new political light that shines on the banality of evil and the fault lines of the memory of evil.

Tuymans is an extraordinary painter who has discovered a language of painting that combines an economical and swift informalism with an insightful and revelatory investigation of our collective subconscious, all within a seemingly emotionally – detached and cool ironic play of painting styles.

This lucid detachment, reflected in a speedily-executed but often highly disciplined brushwork, a drab (usually gray and very pale) and diluted palette, and an extraordinary ability to bring even the most mundane objects (wrapping paper, pillows, oranges) to resonate with an economy of painterly means, makes Tuymans today’s foremost practitioner of informal formalism.

This loose and weathered “informality”, in contrast to the usual hard-edged and over-wrought commercialized designy painting that characterizes much of today’s “professional” painters, makes Tuymans’s work radical in both a historical and stylistic sense. Tuymans’s soft and almost improvisational play of paint, the vast range of greyish tints, the varied dilution ratios, and textures keeps his work rooted in a direct, seemingly guileless, and uncanny material relationship to painting that dates back to Rembrandt’s ultra-materialist handling of paint, and is the key to his tactical ironic style because it refuses to compete with the gloss and slickness of the department store window display aesthetic that dominates galleries in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris and other art centers. With his display of modest painterly anti-techniques Tuymans takes risks that few other artists are even aware of.²

The subject matter of the artist’s work exemplify this risk-taking in their variety: an astonishing range of genres and themes: still-lifes, line-dominated abstractions, portraits, landscapes, studies of everyday objects, interior scenes, and more. This refusal to paint the same thing ad infinitum and thereby create a readily-identifiable brand, is another subversive quality in the painter’s oeuvre. Tuymans’s work carries with it many elements of the psycho-political gadfly. See “The Secretary of State”, 2006, a painting that captures the duplicitous visage of Condoleeza Rice, This engagement between the political/ethical tradition of painting that dates back to the likes of Goya, David, and Picasso and the cool pseudo-journalistic detachment of Warhol, in other words, between ethos and pathos, or, between ground and surface, makes Tuymans a unique figure whose paintings float somewhere between the sublime informal, a.k.a. quasi – “bad” painting and tossed off short attention span dross. But Tuymans paints the heavy, the darkness, the intense subjects of the past with a lightness and a distant sensibility, removed from emotional investment. Tuymans’s emotional detachment is a product of his tactical approach at capturing the darkness of existence (e.g.: the gas chambers of the Holocaust, the colonial exploits of Belgium in the Congo, and the architects of Nazi Germany) despite the personal pain and social trauma he experienced as a young man growing up in the shadows of the devastation of World War II.  He paints with distance so he, and we, can bear to examine the darkness of history, so we can stand to think back and analyze our roles as complicit agents in events such as World War II, colonialism, and the current conflicts in the Middle East.

For Tuymans, the question of “good” painting vs “bad” painting appears to be a central ethical, stylistic, and historical paradigm. His work is good (i.e. subversive, a true cynicism) in its exceptionally (and seemingly) un-self-conscious applications of paint: a direct brushstroke-rich lexicon that when Tuymans’s began to receive attention in the mid 1980s, was exceptionally rare and that continues to go against many stylistic trends. His work is “bad” in its heightened irreverence or utter disregard for the basics of both historical and contemporary pictorial representation: subject matter, composition, and value, in terms of both investment of energy and time (his paintings rarely take longer than one day, and sometimes are painted in one hour) and light and dark (his paintings lack contrast and indeed embrace gray mid-tones and lack of chromatic intensity – perhaps the artist’s own conflation of the poles of light and dark, good and bad).If we take the good to be the elevation of the sublime into the banal towards a heightened understanding and awareness of the banal, and the bad to be the subversion of painterly preciousness into a ballet, a dance of washed out numbness and awkwardness then perhaps Tuymans is attempting a type of extra-value or extra-moral approach to painting: beyond good painting and bad painting.

But this painterly distance still cannot escape the reach of good and evil proper. Tuymans’s scope is never beyond but rather at the surface of good and evil’s historical remnants. Witness such paintings as “Himmler” (1998), “The Architect” (1997), “Leopard” (2000), and others. It is this deceptively loose and informal depiction of evil’s agents in their banal details that keeps Tuymans’s work from the safe semi-intellectualism of today’s cynical painting and makes it worthy of a detailed study in the history of the banality of evil. Indeed Tuymans’s technical language is the key component to this documentation of evil, Painting almost exclusively from photographs that have often been photocopied or altered into a variety of avatars so that they are many times removed from their original incarnation, the artist takes the photographic record and subverts it by reifying it into a painterly painting that washes out the image even more and turns it into some form of still projection of an over-exposed film. It is as if the artist wishes to revise history by advancing the cause of painting as the next stage of visual documentation, both before and after photography and chooses to attack painting by making film stills that are rich in their material handling of oil while simultaneously detached from chromatic intensity.

For example, “Body”, a work from 1990, captures the simplicity of a child’s torso in densely worked up degrees of white paint and black outlines. It is a small work, approximately 16” x 12”, and seems insignificant, overly informal, barely even a study. A close examination however, reveals an interesting relationship between cool and warm grayish whites. The painting is nearly entirely a monochrome but the supple application of a few yellowish – grey – whites at the figure’s waist area along with the two mysterious dark horizontals on each side of the figure’s mid-section make the eye wander around the painting. It is a work where the violence of the black horizontal marks menaces the simple innocence of the child, indeed of the painting as whole. A child-like rendering of a child, one who is wearing some sort of unitard and who is presumably a dance student resting during a rehearsal, “Body” is an enigmatic painting that speaks of the fragility of youth. The painting is done in a very crude and dense fashion that belies its complexity and this paradox is a central them in the artist’s collective body of work.

Indeed Tuymans’s paint handling has opened up a new avenue for many of today’s painters  (e.g.: Rauch, Peyton, Van Plessens, and Doig) who want to recapture the physical and manual nature of the relationship between painter and paint, where the artist actually paints andenvelops the materiality of the painting experience, where painting is again unpredictable, improvisational to a degree and entirely free of self-conscious calculation. This in itself is a radical act that belies the artist’s appearance of cool detachment.³

Tuymans’s symbolic integration of value admixtures and overall contamination of individual chromatic intensities create a lexicon with many symbolic properties that can be isolated in the following equations:

Grey = Absence
Color = Presence

Tuymans’s drab palette is the psychological core of his essentially melancholy work. The melancholy of his palette captures the ephemeral and frustrating aspects of history, of collectively trying to remember evil as we try to forget it, as we try to move away from the effects of its trauma, its violence. . In many ways, Tuymans’s palette is a kind of secret conscience, a gadfly that remains around us as we float from gallery to gallery, from art fair in Basel to biennial in Istanbul. Grey is the color of inertia, of the absence of pathos and ethos and it speaks to the artist’s concern with the relationship between the decay of memory and the decay of the image:

As towards the element of the bleached or the blurred image, I think by close examination you will see that there is a lot of inhabitants of colours in order to come to this situation. Then on a traditional level of course where I come from, the region I come from, painting has a huge tradition and that tradition deals mostly with the idea of depth, and depth deals mostly with the idea of tones and not with full colours, and then there’s also the idea of memorising an image, and every way you can memorise an image your memory itself already is completely inadequate, so in that sense that already unravels one of the things, but most of it is, I think borne out of a

genuine distrust of imagery, distrust in terms of not only comprehending it but also making it. And that probably is new, I mean that could be seen as contemporary, because I work of course with the figurative image, I could be easily seen as a person who works with the representation of representations that already exist, but on the other hand through the mimicry of that there is also the element of reconstructing that imagery, and that is something else, and in terms of history it’s not just history painting, it’s the realising of history which is an important difference.⁴

The artist’s washed out chromatic greys become a central material in the artist’s reconstruction of memory, of narrative oriented around the relationship between the loss of the real and its reconstruction through looking back. Perhaps we can see Tuymans’s work as a form of historiographical psycho-painterly dictum on the loss of the real in relation to the latent distance of the banal, a form of revaluation of painting’s value from cynical and sanitized clean work to a messy, casual and human-all-too-human embrace of the real. That this enigmatic artist’s work – perhaps the most preposterous and informal paintings since Matisse – has achieved acceptance by the gamekeepers of contemporary art is due almost solely to Tuymans’s employment of “bad painting” as a comouflage technique through which he instigates his meditation on the real and the banal.

In this way Tuymans is ultimately a tactical colorist and ironist who employs the muddy grey-dominant color scheme as a chromatic study of the macro-picture at the expense of the many details of the micro. His are painterly guerilla pictures. They are paintings of our collective postmodern subconscious. While his work risks appearing as fashionably detached informalism, it actually depicts the traces of both the artist’s and our recent historical agony. It asks us to attribute intensity and color to it in the way we might retouch an old faded photograph of our grandmother so that we can present it as a gift to our brother. This re-touching is its own type of chromatic seduction technique, a passive-aggressive tactic of attraction and supports a view of the artist as a strong colorist whose innovation amounts to a form of rebasement of painterly and libidinal economic value from the ironic standard to the grey standard, a rebasement that is ultimately tied to the artist’s devaluation of contemporary painting’s traditions and technical givens.

Perhaps this is Tuymans’s tactic? Perhaps in such preposterous paintings as “Wrapping Paper” and “Orchid” the banal resonates and the absence of passion, of any kind of sentiment or sentience may be viewed through the proper grey-colored glasses as its own form of affirmation, or more precisely, a type of double neutrality that turns irony back on itself and opens up a space for the banal to presence into the sublime.

This may be the fundamental problem of contemporary occidental art: the problem of the relationship between value and the real, between capital and nature/the mediascape. This is a problem where the question of semiotics takes center stage. This question of the relationship between the surface and the ground, the relationship between the massage and the message is one of the fundamental problems facing the interpreters of contemporary art today. If the study of signs is primarily the study of packaging, of the envelopement of meaning, of surface appearance and its symbolic importance in relationship to the real then we have speculated on its value in our relationship to the real and in particular, in how we engage with works of art. We have valued it so highly that the value of semiotics as a cipher of the real’s hermeneutical code is rendered practically meaningless.

To download the complete paper in Microsoft Word format, click HERE.

Notes

1. Baudrillard, Jean, “The Conspiracy of Art” in The Conspiracy of Art, Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, pg. 27, Lotringer, Sylvere, editor, Hodges, Ames, translator, Verso, 1996.

2. However, one of the dangers of these risks, is a lack of rigor and self-editing, perhaps a product of the painter’s detachment from the concerns of clean and “finished” painting. He is sometimes too prolific for his own good and one could call question his self-editing abilities, a key ingredient in a prolific artist’s integrity.

3. There are other young painters who are returning to a more human and manual relationship to their materials. Artists such as John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, and Cecily Brown are three such exemplars, but neither of them comes close to the craftsmanship and complex relationship between technique and subject matter that characterize the work of Luc Tuymans. Neither of these painters approaches Tuymans’s level of chromatic and stylistic invention. Neither of these painters attacks the “objectness” and the value of painting as poignantly, if at all.

4.  Interview on BBC Radio with John Tusa, date unknown, excerpted from http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/tuymans_transcript.shtml

If the enemy masses his forces he Loses ground, if he scatters he loses strength.
-Mario Merz quoting Vietcong General Vo Nguyen Giap, 1968

Everything has always been about space, about our relationship to movement in space, possession of space, and power over others (nature, animals, and humans) to acquire and protect space. No matter how sophisticated we may think painting has become pictorially, semiotically, as a practice, or as a discourse, we are always painting as dwellers of both geopolitical and psychic space. As such, painting has always held a close relationship to power struggles over space and to survival, to violence, and to war. To speak of painting and space is to speak of the geopolitical implications of the painted image in light of its materiality and to movement between spaces since the first painters were nomads. Such a discussion must necessarily begin with a look at the cave paintings of prehistory.

In many ways, because of our fear of the natural world and our subsequent will to control it as an instrument, we have always been vector artists, movers between points, vehicles and vessels. The first painters were also the first vector artists whose earliest-known painted works were depictions of the creatures and deities that both comforted and terrorized them, that held dominion over their known physical world, and to whom they were beholden for survival. Painting began as a celebration of, and meditation on, the paradox and delicate balance between space and movement, between life and death. Violence inhabited painting from the beginning. The oldest-known paintings, works literally painted with the ground up minerals, earths, stones, vegetables, and other materials mixed with water, animal fat, and later, oils, were three-dimensional histories of movement cave walls and across the vectors of the mysterious and dangerous worlds outside the darkness of the cave. The first vector graphics were literally and figuratively culled from territory, and were housed in the havens of the darkened interior spaces that were illuminated solely by flames fueled by animal fat. As such, the material and semiotic elements of cave painting, indeed of all so-called “tribal and prehistoric art” were inseparable from each other. They were so close together in the painting process that both the painter and viewer inhabited the same direct material consciousness in relation to painting. Or rather, there was no relationship between the painted image, its makers, and its viewers as this would presume a distinction and a distance between the three. Instead, the material presence of the work was an extension of the consciousness that created it. Before we had “art”, “art works”, and “artists”, before the separation of subject and object, there were simply, creative acts that were as integral to life and death as hunting, eating and giving birth.

The artists in Lascaux, Altamira, Africa, indeed all the prehistoric and many current-day tribal painters lived the relationship between color and surface, or energy and matter, as a relationship to the physical and psychic elements of their time. Their use of the textures, contours, and dramatic changes of the surfaces they painted on as pictorial complements to the forms they depicted were symbols of their relationship to the territories that they inhabited. In other words, they knew no metaphorical distance and hence they had no need for three-dimensional illusionism. Instead, their illusions were concerned with the spiritual world associated with their survival in the natural world. Because there was no objectified conception of “art” there was no notion of concept, idea, theme, or the sign. In short, there was no need for semiotics as we know it today.

For the contemporary artist, the notion of art without object, without a semiotic presence, is practically impossible to grapple, or at the very least, runs counter to one of the grounding principles of the contemporary art practice with its objectification of the art work as either capitalist product or intellectual object or both.The cave artists’ use of topography and changing surface textures made their paintings sculptural forms where the notion of pictorial composition and spatial illusionism, was superseded by the immediacy of painting in the physical world itself, where paintings were architectural in nature and not yet portable commodities. These works were not “art“ in the sense that we now conceive of it. Rather, they were sculptural embodiments of the physical and spiritual worlds as humans perceived and constructed them. These paintings were points in time and space.

They were documents of movement and of territory where the artists were vehicles traveling between them.

Painting was and always has been a three-dimensional art form, one whose roots lie in this material relationship to color, to the vehicle, to surface texture, to architecture, and to the play of light illuminating the painted image. In truth, it is a mistake, for which we pay dearly, to attempt to pedagogically distinguish between two-dimensional art (painting, photography, printmaking, and drawing) and three-dimensional art (sculpture, performance, installation, etc.) as we now do. To fully engage painting as a practice and as a history we must understand it materially and sculpturally, from the point of view of cave artists and begin from there. The significance of this material perspective lies in its relationship to life and death, to temporality and vitality, war and violence. The materiality of prehistoric painting has always been centered on death and the fragility of life, and it is this materiality that has largely disappeared from the equation of painting, indeed, from most art today. Materiality implies mortality. For the human being to arrive at painting, he/she had to begin by killing. The prehistoric and tribal painters acquired, and still acquire the tools essential to painting through a knowledge of their surroundings, the need and the will to kill, and a processing of vegetable and animal materials into pigments, vehicles, supports, and implements. This direct relationship to materiality meant and continues to mean that life and death was and, continues to be, ever present. For the cave artists, there was neither time nor space for intellectual distance because survival in the natural world itself was at stake. In a strange and ironic historical turn, today, with the onset of catastrophic climate change, expanding warfare, and other economic and ecological catastrophes, we can say that life and death have once again returned to the equation of art. Or, rather that they never really left it but that the artist him/herself turned away from it due to the widening gap between cause and effect that modern technology has instituted as a precondition for its existence. We can say that with all our attempts at ruling and controlling the physical world, the physical world is reeking its revenge on us and we have once more arrived at a point where we should fear it, where we should countenance it with awe as it attempts to devour us, despite our sophisticated and contemptible technological arrogance. This is not to say that we turn away from technology per se, assuming such a decision was even within the realm of possibility, or that we attempt to turn back in time to a fictional time of simplicity, no. What we must re-consider is our relationship to techne and to physis,

For painting to do this it must re-acquaint itself with life and death, and simultaneously, rise out of the superfluity of a joyous relationship to life and death, to violence, and to war. This is a paradox akin to life relying on death to realize its strongest form. To understand the origins of painting we must find a way to intimately experience this vitality, this directness, this proximity to death and the play of space, of territory in relationship to death with humility. It is this vitality, this meditation on, and relationship to, death that most distinguishes prehistoric art from the art of our times.

Today we paint, we produce paintings with but traces of this vitality, with a hunger for a visual image that never gets truly fulfilled and that can only be explained by a need to experience color and form on a flattened three-dimensional space, to behold ourselves and our world. We consume images as empty visual calories, perpetually engorging ourselves to turn away from life and death as we become visually and psychically impaired as a result. This image production and subsequent beholding is the seed from which, the Greek dramas, film, and television emerge, from which current-day commodity aesthetics and computer graphics are derived. But these are only traces, ghosts of painting’s history now reduced to our collective subconscious and relegated to museums and history books in our industrialized and simulation-obsessed mediated world.¹ Today, with the commodification, industrialization, designificaiton, and simulation of everything, from our food supply and energy, to our relationships, to ourselves, and to art, contemporary painting is but one branch of a specialized economic practice at the service of the wealthy and intellectual classes who crave cultural legitimacy.

it is a negation, a denial of the vitality of life and death. What has changed more than the art itself in the last 30,000 years is the consciousness of artists and how they conceive of art. With the economic and technological evolutions western history has brought us, we have seen art adapt and become but one aspect of a techno-economic production system first put into play by Christianity, then later by the more modern forms of capitalism in Europe and North America to the point today where art is but a new form of cultural and economic neo-colonialist output in the form of biennials and art fairs where in an effort to attain “cultural and political legitimacy”, countries in Asia, South America, and Africa assimilate into the western art game.
But this evolution was always present in the work and the will of the prehistoric artist, in the human being’s attempt at mastery and efficiency that gave rise to technical innovation. What has since changed are the stakes of our objectification of the planet, the environment, and our totalization of both humanity and the natural worlds. We can no longer afford to be so far removed from our natures as material artists working with physis and psyche in a symbiotic relationship. The totalization and objectification of the other, of the world outside us removes us from the biological and instills within us an ethic of the ego, or the egological at great cost. The apotheosis of this detachment, of this dematerialization, is the computer and electronic art that simulates all material into light and data is the most advanced form of this detachment from life and death.

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Notes

1.It is important to remember the distinction between “our” technologized and commodified world whose roots lie in Europe and whose development now stems from American corporatism, with its modern economies, technologies, and militaries and the so-called “other” pre-industrialized isolated worlds still more or less removed from the “modern” or “postmodern” world of globalization. This distinction is critical to an understanding of how art is practiced differently by such peoples as Australian Aborigines, native Canadians, and Pacific Islanders, for example, neither of whom escape the vortex of contemporary capitalism as their works are highly commodified. The height of irony here is that these works, created by cultures still much more in contact with life and death, with their material and spiritual surroundings, are relegated to the lower realm of “craft” or “indigenous art” by the capitalist-centric purveyors of contemporary and modern art, oblivious to the neo-colonialist conceits such evaluations embody.

Surface versus Ground: the battle between the sign and that which is signified. This contest encmpasses good and evil, rich and poor, Republican and Democrat, environmentalist and gun lobyist and all of the central epistemological dichotomies of our time. The latter half of the twentieth century was the beginning of the spectre of the sign, of the simulacrum of the real into hyperreality, in Baudrillard’s words.

For Art, the surface prevailed over the ground with the rise of pop art, in general and Andy Warhol in specific. The devolution of art into a visual language of signs, of the marketplace, coupled with the rise of cynical irony as the definitive contemporary conditon, turned the notion of truth inside out. This was the end of the beautiful and transcendental in favor of the vulgar and the immediate inmpulse of the mediasphere. Today, with the likes of the second order Warhol surface artists such as Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst, we see the outer limits of the surface at work. Indeed, many may argue that, in politics, economics, contemporary art, and any, or all, spheres of power, the sufrace is all that exists, at least in appearance. But they would be wrong because the ground never goes away. No matter how much art and politics, philosophy and the mediasophere live by the sign, the real presences from concealment as a reminder of our relationship to materiality, to nature, to the ground. Global warming, recurring “natural” disasters in the United States, China, and Myanmar are but reminders of the power of the ground. What could be a more tragic and appropriate symbol of this contest than the cataclysmic earthquakes in China in the Spring of 2008? The ground swallowing up the innocent and the shabby structures of the corrupt and short-sighted Chinese government, is the perfect metaphor for the revenge of the ground over surface: China, the new future world power, the new surging economy humbled and brought to its knees by its angry citizens mourning the loss of their children, parents, brothers, sisters, friends and other family members. The ground and the surface: Two heavyweights in a game.