First of all I want to write about the wondrous large untitled work of Ad Reinhardt as it was installed in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last time I was there. Reinhardt is one of my artistic heroes: in his work the revenge of painting against photography is taken to new peaks of intensity, his works are unreproducible, a photograph of a late Reinhardt is literally almost nothing.
Most of my art-history training would encourage me to focus on the painting as an object, as effectively something bracketed-off from the world in which we come upon it.
Art history generally doesn't look at matters "outside" the frame of the painting and this willful erasure of how a work presents itself is enshrined in the practice of photographing work that in fact, in the world, on the wall of any museum or owner, has an elaborate frame, as if it bore none, as if its actual situation of presentation were nothing. Through photography paintings are continually being reduced to images: texture, scale, surface, edge, frame, position, height, lighting, dialogue with other works are continually occluded.
It is this phenomenon that Benjamin was really writing about in the celebrated essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility". Of course all that gets reproduced in photography is the image and what is not reducible to the image, what Benjamin called the "aura" is left to its own devices.
When I was taught about this essay I took it to mean that somehow the reproducible image had "won" over painting, over the claims that every painting makes for its own unique way of being in the world. It is entirely regrettable to me that this essay is so continuously taken to mean that somehow painting is dead, that it has lost its aura or that it should never have had one: I hear young artists so often make similar claims, usually linked to the fact that painting has a merely "historical" legitimacy and has effectively been superseded by whatever medium is fashionable at the moment (back in the 1980's it was video, nowadays its probably digital technology and the sort of high-tech special effects one sees at international arts fairs these days).
My experience of the SFMOMA Reinhardt and a great many other painters in the so-called "monochrome" tradition, in the flesh as they say, reveals only that the "auratic" work of art, which is to say the "auratic" experience of a work of art is still possible and that the claim that photography has led to the "death" of the "aura" is completely false: the unreproducible nuances of colour, surface and texture in a Reinhardt, Marden, Rothko or Ryman are still there to be found if one looks hard enough and no amount of photographic reproduction could capture such an experience.
This is one reason why it pleases me greatly that no single photograph can capture the nuances of shifting colours displayed by my own works: that fact that at least 2 pictures would be necessary to capture the field of colour set up by my work means that there is still visual experience possible without any sort of reduction to the image.
For me, the monochrome tradition is valuable precisely because of this necessary attention to nuance: the monochrome is at once before and after the image.
The history of representational painting, from at least the origins of perspective (whether simple or distorted, single or multiple), has dominated not just what people expect from painting but also what they do in front of one: the frontal view is the most important, it is best experienced from a frontal position, ideally with the eye of the viewer parallel, in all senses of the word, to the vanishing point in the illusory depth of the construction.
For this reason I prefer photographs of my work from an oblique angle and featuring the wall, the sliver of space behind the painting and most importantly the very edge of the frontal surface, where the frontal plane curves off and becomes the perpendicular sides of the canvas.
Even abstract painting is arguably dominated by the concept of representation and a geometry of viewing that privileges an identification of the frontal surface of the support with a so-called "picture-plane".
The contemporary popularised version of principles articulated by Greenberg which focus on the putative "flatness" of the picture plane could only have been made by someone who did not pay attention to the edges of real stretched canvases. The curvature, that swerving change of direction made by stretching over a frame, is completely fascinating to me precisely because it is so often ignored.
The ignorance serves a clear purpose - that painting be reducible to the picture plane or that, in short, the painting be a picture (even a non-representational one).
For me, the best paintings are those that reward a refusal to give in to that ignorance - they reward the oblique, the view from the side, from below, from above, whilst in motion, in the time it take to change focus, the change of viewpoint from sitting to standing for example.
Such an idea is enacted daily in the way that people look at paintings especially. I have seen it myself, they stand in front for roughly the time it takes to take a photograph which, in some cases they do as well, as if to verify the object as something which has been seen, something that verifies their presence there. Most of the time it is what the French characterise as an "instantanee", a snap-shot which opens and shuts the gaze. Sometimes, if you're lucky, it's a longer exposure but the experience with the work remains part of a chain of instants or moments that is usually festooned as well with great narratives, histories, interpretations, etc etc ad infinitum.
Next time you are in a museum, especially one with famous works of art, watch how people look rather than . . . watch.
For me, the paintings I love best are those which one must watch rather than look at.
Why the shift in register there from "looking" to "watching"? Watching implies waiting, patience, care, duration, expectation, intensity not just extension although it is also implied that watching takes time, is a way of marking time even as you give it over to watching. You watch something you want to have, you watch what you are hunting, you watch something that draws you in and won't let you go, you watch out for something, you keep watch over something and time flows differently then, as space contracts so the thing watched might expand to fill it - it turns the viewer into an observer, even to the extent that one can be made more aware of one's own observation.
So let's watch what happens when you approach this piece by Ad Reinhardt.
The work, a taller one than the familiar 5-foot square "black paintings", is hung next to a doorway or opening in the wall on which the work is hung. On walking through the opening I faced (for at least a moment) the same direction as the painting, looking towards the opposing wall. I could only see the work itself with some sort of movement, a re-orientation towards what was behind me at the moment I walked through the opening.
On account of the slightest difference in reflectance between two almost identical "blacks" I could see a slight flash of light on the central element of the more or less invisible forms, only for a second whilst walking in a curve towards it. It appeared only from a particular angle, where the light entered into a sort of creative interference with the surface, in a way that, according to his published comments on the importance of a non-reflective surface, Reinhardt would not have authorised.
I was amazed however by what immediately seemed to be a painting that says "hello there" or "how is it going?" to you. For an instant I could have believed that an ostentatiously self-conscious or consciously "staged" work such as Reinhardt's could in fact appear self-aware, possessing a kind of consciousness including an awareness that it is being seen right there and then.
This still fascinates me even as I reconstruct the act of perceiving the work in memory, from memory.
How might one paint in such a way that rewards the viewer from all angles? That throws into doubt the primacy of the frontal view, that takes into account the physical movement of the viewer towards, away from, around the work itself. We all know that paintings do not move but art history and criticism tends to ignore the movement of the viewer in the space around the work.
This space is my real point of interest these days.
I often tell people that my real interest is not making images but creating a space where various fugitive fleeting images can come to presence: as I stop the process when I can see myself in the surface they are, in effect, portraits of the viewer whereby I am only the first viewer.
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