The Painterly and the In-Between - Peter Shand p132-149
Jan Bryant, Art Making in the Age of Global Capitalism (Bryant 2019) - art historian and critical theorist.
Shand quotes Bryant as introducing the term ‘“the painterly” to identify and specify a particular condition of painting relative to its interior and exterior political relations. Her book addresses the possibility of political criticality for art making in the current neoliberal context and assesses a diversity of practices and practitioners in respect to this core question. “The painterly”, is a term that she uses to embrace the heterogeneity of contemporary painting practices whilst retaining a central proposition that specifies and to some extent isolates painting qua painting in discussions concerning the political in art’ (Bryant 2019, 146-148).
painting qua painting - painting understood purely in terms of itself. Focusing on its formal, material and medium-specific qualities rather than its content, symbolism or external references. NB: Greenberg and Modernist art - the essence of painting, flatness, colour, surface and composition.
“the painterly” - term in art theory to describe a style of painting that emphasises visible brushwork, texture and painting
Shand, responds to this concept of the painterly - with an aim of leaning into the value of its vagueness as a term. He focuses on two NZ artists, Judy Millar and Patrick Lundberg and how this term has implications for the political criticality of their practices. He seeks supplement Bryant’s clarification of the term “the painterly”, ‘as a timely and distinctive mode of experimentation and critique’ and set the term against the philosopher Francois Julien’s term “the in-between” (Shand, p133).
Francois Julien, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonbojective through Painting (2009). This book explores Chinese painting in a way that challenges Western thinking. Draws on Daoist philosophy. The Great Image is formless, emerges from a state of openness, fluidity and transformation. Instead of abstraction, a non-objective approach to painting which is not about things or concepts, but about presence, process and ‘becoming'. Julien proposes an alternative to Western binaries like abstraction v figuration. Shand describes it such - ‘the intent of painters not to depict or represent but to evoke and suggest’ (p135).
Shand compares both artists through their shared OPENNESS to the possibilities of the painterly. ‘both practices are examples of modes of fundamentally political criticality in artmaking that open out to lives and experiences beyond approaches that might more easily be recognised for their overt of declared political provocation.’ (Shand, p133)
Bryant’s description of ‘the painterly’ as nebulous and evasive. Not a deprecatory term but points to its political urgency.
Shand explains that at the heart of both Bryant and Julien’s thinking is that painting should refuse to cohere, conform to a singular, declarative proposition.
The fluidity of painting. Inhabiting an in-between realm. That painting should operate in-between: in-between traditional nodes of enquiry, in-between proclivities of audience and critical interpretation or response, and in-between presence and absence. (p136)
Shand quote Julien: "‘ Philosophy [is] unable to experiment and dissolve ideas, as the painter’s making does…Philosophy is deprived of the adventurous fumbling the hand, torment and opportunity at once, that makes the painter always try again and take ever greater risks (Julien 2009, 45-46). (Shand does warn of Romanticising the role of the painter.)
‘Thus painting is a mutable, ongoing event rather than a sign or index of anything preceding and independent of the making. Unmaking and making again and Un making again of the painting.’ (p136)
TAKE AWAYS:
I am reminded of Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois book, Formless: A User’s Guide (1997) - formlessness being a disruptive force not just an absence of form, undoing the purity of what painting is supposed to be, its ‘essence’ (Greenberg). How painting should be corrupted, contaiminated by other art forms. As set against Julien’s non-objective approach to painting, and that it allows for process and presence to become the artwork.
Painting seems to be constantly evolving because it is tricky to pin down, to categorise, without it morphing into something other. Does the vagueness of the painterly keep it strong. The artist’s openness.
Julien’s comparisons of philosophy and painting - how philosophy does not have ‘the fumbling of the hand’, the opportunity to take repeated risks, to experiment and dissolve ideas. Thinking of writing around Cy Twombly and his ‘mistakes’, working outs, his ‘fumbling of hand’. (Tacita Dean, A Panegyric, 2008)
‘Thus painting is a mutable, ongoing event rather than a sign or index of anything preceding and independent of the making. Unmaking and making again and Un making again of the painting.’ (p136) Making and Unmaking. Peter Shand’s article in Art New Zealand 1999, comparing Judy Millar’s work to Penelope’s shroud - in its making and then unmaking.