In working on merging elements of landscape painting and geometric abstraction, I've come up against this word 'materiality'. Its not a new word, but rather an incessant itch as it reeks of all that is superficial in the art world. The idea that art, or more specifically, painting, should ever been about it's flatness really just got a lot of people to take a good long ride for nearly 50 years. I get it. I disagree with it and I think it's the kind of navel-gazing that leads artist to their own death. in short - stupid, arbitrary and insincere.
I remember reading Claude Tousignant quotes about objectifying paint and how 'the only thing left was paint', but Tousignant was painting sound waves in circles. that's not abstract. that's a real science so it's referring to something. It's a visualization of the way sound waves move so it fails to meet the requirements set that it can't be referring to anything. I think it's kinda silly.
Chris Dorosz, was using globs of paint and stinging them along vinyl thread and the globs, hung in consecutive rows like beaded curtains were making up pixilated images of his parents living room. I've always been fascinated with the creating of an image by using other images, but I like the DIY aesthetic. If it's machine made there s something too dehumanizing about it... anyway...
So I was laying in bed this morning listening to Little Mermaid, (yes, that's what the Kopfensteiner-Fowler house hold listens to in the morning) and I was thinking of the Dali painting of the artist and the water and the cats all flying through the air and it occurred to me that the bucket of water was frozen in time... if this was down with paint, it would have a similar effect.
One of the things that I find a little silly about this so called theory about post modernist painting is that it takes an artist applying the paint to the surface and the surface is flat. That's what the definition of painting or 'a painting' is. yet, these artists are going off about the materiality of paint and their concerns or their explorations of it. by creating these thickly laid painted canvases that push in to low level relief sculptures is into kinda defying this whole notion of flatness? is this idea dead?
meanwhile, back to the bed and little mermaid - so take paint cans, like pollack did and throw the paint in the air and while it's in the air, photographic it using the same technology using to do all those cool matrix stunt effects. cool so far? anyway, then take those images and build a 3d digital model of the paint in motion and then use that model to build up a to scale sculpture of the paint in motion, but frozen in time.
See, the way I see it, is this notion of action painting, with people like Pollock, you get the motion two-dimensionally. you get the end result of his actions. where it lands on the paint, but what you are missing is the action it took to get it there. it is the surface that is the end of the story - but where is the rest of the story? Where is the actual action. maybe I've lost it here...
what I'm seeing is a room with a sculpture in it that is paint, seemingly frozen in time that one can walk around and think about the nature of paint, which goes back to this idea of materiality... and with it, the reaction of how gravity works on the paint.. but whats interesting is that the paint would react differently depending on the spread at which its thrown... so look at the paint being thrown fast or slowly... it could kind of have a tendril effect through the air, like smoke or food dye in water.
so the music ends and I'm feeling pretty and I have to go into the shower and Rick kinda half listens to what I'm talking about because I usually ramble and he's used to it, but I still think it's a good idea. will I ever do it? I dunno. has it been done before. - probably... I haven't checked... I just think it makes a good illustration of paint in motion without the use of a landing or an end place and again I think it speaks to the material itself... it's a subjectification of paint in motion... I dunno - I just think walking into a room with a Pollock style sculpture that's floating in the air would be cool to look at and it would change as you waled around it... all those paint lines intersecting...
one last thought: throw two brightly coloured streams of paint at each other and then build a sculpture of that... SPASH!
...Fibreglass? individual droplets.
