Literary Review no. 3 - Reassembling Painting - David Joselit

Reassembling Painting – David Joselit

Modern painters have explored multiple possibilities for creating what might be called subject-objectmarks, establishing points along a gradient running from ostensibly pure subjective expression to the elaboration of objective formal systems.[1]

In the opening paragraphs of Joselit’s essay “Reassembling Painting”, he proposes that modern abstract painters have found themselves on a gradient that runs between the opposite posts of pure subjective expressionism, he uses Vassily Kandinsky to illustrate this, and the objective formal systems of artists like Piet Mondrian.[2] He explains how the modern abstract artist was engaged in the ongoing challenge to reconcile subject and object through the passage of ‘force through matter,’ i.e., marks in paint (etc.) on a surface.[3] The passage represents the investigation of how “marks, or gestures, occupy the space between subjects and objects or between people and things”, a seemingly antithetic relationship.[4]

Richard Shiff is quoted in Joselit’s essay as explaining this concept with Impressionist painting. Shiff describes how the deposit of paint acts as an impression that both registers an “objective optical sensation and a subjective temperament”.[5] This impression being the embryo of knowing both the subject and the object but the passage acting as the working out or remapping of that relationship. The canvas becomes an arena of discovery and the gestures, or painterly marks, the expression of that discovery.

These ‘painterly marks’ Joselit goes on to argue, represent the fusing of subject-object and is of great significance in modern art’s redistribution of subjectivity and objectivity, worthy of taking its place alongside the readymade, collage and the monochrome in the annals of modern painting. “A mark in paint registers the passage of force through matter”, the gesture is both action and residue of the passage, becoming both subject and object.”[6] The residue of the gesture is the relationship becoming object because it acknowledges the materials used, in this case, paint, but in fact anything that leaves a mark.

Joselit, from the onset of his essay, identifies how the abstract artist is involved in the ongoing challenge of subject-object reconciliation, and that this challenge results in the working out as the process and the result. The mistakes are the working out of the problem, which is not meant to be resolved but worked through from different angles. That is what makes abstract art engaging and gives it critical longevity. Tacita Dean in her essay on Cy Twombly, A Panegyric, makes the comment that “no one shows their mistakes anymore, the development of their thinking across the page”, that everything in the digital world appears unconditional and without doubt.[7] In painting there is an opportunity to show how thought processes are worked out.

Twombly crosses out as a way of making the surface work: his rubbing out is a process of adding as well as subtracting: a buildup of cancellation when the connection has broken, marking to say and then not to say: retraction that leaves a trace, because what Twombly is working on, and working out, is how to make a painting.[8]

Peter Shand in his chapter, “The Painterly and the In-Between,” points out that the concept of ‘the painterly’ is a useful adjectival noun that connects descriptive and subject/objective conditions as well as connecting descriptive and active behaviours and dispositions as an adverbial noun  ‘painting qua painting.’ He discusses critical theorist Jan Bryant’s descriptive term ‘the painterly’ which she uses to identify a particular condition of painting in relation to its interior and exterior political relations.[9]  She uses the term to comprehend the diversity of contemporary painting practices but also proposes that this sets it apart from discussions concerning the political in art. She has an awareness that painting can be seen as a distinct medium and practice and at the same time, can be seen as particular things, objects.

Shand describes New Zealand artist Judy Millar’s paintings as examples of being “action and object both … a continuous navigation of the possibility of painting”.[10]  This harks back to Joselit’s discussions around the abstract artist’s challenges but identifies the challenge as being a navigational one. Millar’s determination to move away from the use of brushes resulted in wiping off paint with rags, which resulted in magnified brush-like gestures: the reconciliation of the subject-object happening accidentally during the physical action, or the navigation. In an interview with Millar, Jarrett Earnest asks about her views on the physical part of painting (but he clarifies that he does not mean the act of painting but its physical presence, as an object). She replies “It’s hard for me to separate the physicality of the object from the act of painting. I get so physically involved.”[11]She makes the comment that she is less interested in a painting being material fact, more that it acts as a proposition.

I’m searching for something that resembles something. The word ‘gesture’, it seems so frivolous, or …throwaway or… arbitrary. I’ll work until there is a moment of recollection or recognition. I have no idea what I’m recollecting until I see it in the painting.[12]

Paintings become objects of working out, navigating, and remapping, delivering moments of recollection, debate and discovery. Millar’s comment that paintings can offer a proposition is reference to this passage but also suggests audience engagement.  

Millar refers to  the physical labour she undertakes when painting. Joselit describes how artistic labour has been re-organised in abstract art, that the labour element in the readymade becomes the choice, in collage it becomes the arrangement, and in the monochrome, it becomes the decerning of necessary elements. However, if we include the ‘painterly mark’ into the mix, evidence of manual labour returns in the form of physical action and motion. Through the painterly mark, artistic labour is reconceived.

The title of Joselit’s essay, suggests that there has been a degree of reassembling in the world of painting. The modern abstract artist wrestled with the task of creating subject-object marks which merge concepts of “objective optical sensation and subjective temperament” and contemporary abstract artists still wrestle with the idea as we have seen with Judy Millar’s work.[13] Yet rather than solving the conundrum, the challenge has become ongoing because it not only references what has gone before in painting, but also what is happening now and perhaps in the future.  What has become more immediately engaging is the working out of the equation. The mistakes writ large, the remapping, the navigation, the propositions, all laid out on the canvas for us to cogitate and debate and keep painting relevant.

[1] David Joselit, “Reassembling Painting,” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, ed. Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit (DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2016),169.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] David Joselit, “Reassembling Painting,” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, ed. Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit (DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2016),169.

[7] Tacita Dean, “A Panegyric,” in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (Tate Publishing, 2008), 35.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Peter Shand, “The Painterly and the In-Between,” in The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics, ed. Simon Ingram, Gregory Minissale, Caroline Vercoe and Victoria Wynne-Jones (Kerber Verlag, 2022), 132.

[10] Peter Shand, “The Painterly and the In-Between,” in The Dialogics of Contemporary Art: Painting Politics, ed. Simon Ingram, Gregory Minissale, Caroline Vercoe and Victoria Wynne-Jones (Kerber Verlag, 2022), 137.

[11] Jarrett Earnest, “Judy Millar – Brushstrokes” in Documents 2021-2023, ed. Michael Lett (Michael Lett Publishing, 2023), 333.

[12] Ibid., 338.

[13] David Joselit, “Reassembling Painting,” in Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, ed. Manuela Ammer, Achim Hochdörfer, and David Joselit (DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2016),169.