I’ve spent my entire adult life in thrall to the achievements of modernist artists. It’s no surprise then that the work I’ve been making for the last few years is a deliberate response to certain sorts of twentieth century picture-making.
After decades making sprawling, unpredictable, often ragged pieces of performance art (at the limit of my artistic control, and often beyond it to be honest) I now find myself working at the opposite artistic extreme and producing small-scale, carefully considered, utterly abstract paintings.
The transition began with collage. I began making collages immediately after I settled in New York City in 2003. Only a few inches across, and made from pieces of discarded paper and card, they looked a lot like the work of Kurt Schwitters, if a little more rectilinear. They allowed me to combine fragments of the world beyond art – tickets, paper bags, menus, scrawled notes, and the like – with an instinctive feel for the modernist pictorial grid.
I showed them to a gallerist who specializes in collage-based work. I rather hoped he might exhibit them. “Well …” he began unenthusiastically, “you obviously know the rhetoric.” I felt as though my art had been dismissed in six words. I subsequently destroyed most of the collages I’d made up until then.
I took a long break: I needed to think through what I was doing, and whether “knowing the rhetoric” was an altogether bad thing.
Certainly there is an entertaining irony in looking back something like fifty years into the history of art to make paintings that look like doll’s house versions of the high modernist abstractions of Frank Stella, Al Held, Anne Truitt and others. These were artists for whom progressing, looking forward, and rejecting what had already been done was at the core of their ethos.
But I’m also fascinated by suggestions made by Ad Reinhardt, whose black paintings are seen by some as so advanced that no one could advance beyond them. He proposed that the very idea of progress in art is peculiar to the western world of the last few hundred years. Far more common are those cultures that assume that images or artefacts to be looked at should not change – that they should be exactly the same as the images or artefacts that had been made as far back as anyone could remember. It’s a seductive idea, and sometimes I try to work like this: I re-use the same shapes, the same colors, and the same formats over and over. But despite myself I crave complexity and I am repeatedly drawn to new possibilities. Thus scrap materials disappeared from the collages; I began drawing my own collage materials on the computer and printing them; I built up the collage grounds to emphasize their depth; I started making painted versions of the collages; I increased the size of the paper I was working on; I changed the sort of paint I was using; I grew frustrated with paper and began working on canvas; I worked on bigger canvases and then smaller ones again; I extended my painted images to the very edges of the canvas, and then around the edges. And, most recently, I have begun to stack canvases one on top of another so that I have begun to wonder whether what I am making are actually colored wall-hanging sculptures.
Is it wrong to admit that you find your own work fascinating? Because I certainly do.