Painting/Splitting

August 2020

The question concerning painting

This is not aesthetic theory as written from an objective witness with the vantage point of being singular and up high. This is not critical theory, although I am critical of theories that seem to stake so much so high that so little is ever actually moved into being. I want to move something, for something to move, or to be moved, into being. I want to paint into being something that moves or is moved from its very becoming. I want to give something to painting, and so I am writing in order that I may be coming to painting. In coming to painting through writing, I am making writing the way I am making paintings in that I am laying down material without predetermining the final form or finale. Less about meanings, the writing is about doings. I want to write into being the possibilities of what paintings can or might do. In doing paintings through doing writings, the question that emerges is: What are the conditions for doing paintings, for making paintings do?

What are the stakes?

In locating the stakes of an inquiry, I follow this formula as put forth by Llyotard: “The stakes are in discovering [the] rules rather than in [… ]supposing […] knowledge as a principle” (Differend, xiv). A “rule” is defined as: “one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. Lloytard clearly directs us to DISCOVER RULES rather than to SUPPOSE KNOWLEDGE. In other words, a principle is located in a discovery of a rule, rather than in an assuming of a knowing. Knowledge offers facts: facts are fixed; defined; determined; and ultimately ‘fastened securely in position’; as objects in memory for future retrieval. There is maybe even then a kind of relief to knowing, in knowing, for the knowing sought, once found, supposes the acquisition of a stable object that gets crystallized as knowledge knick-knacks. A knowing, in this way, is a kind of capturing, or a taking into possession. This discovery, then, requires a “free relationship” to the question concerning painting: “the relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of…” where the “essence of” [Wesen] something is “considered to be what the thing is” (Heidegger, 1977; p3-4). I shall therefore conduct a kind of phenomenological treatise of painting. “Phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking” […] It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing.” (MP, p10) I should like to attempt an examination of the phenomenology of my painting practice, starting therefore with the “facticity” of its operations, essences, objects, images.

On Discovering Rules

How is discovery enacted, enabled, provoked or performed? What is the way to discovering? “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings” (Mearleau Ponty, 123).

On Principles

There are the Principles and Elements of Design, yes. These are visual, formal ingredients, when taken together in differing degrees, offer a recipe for painting. The correct or varying combination of these ingredients (ie. line, shape, form, color, contrast, harmony) amass what a painting affects or effects. Choosing the colors, for example, are choices the artist can make.

Chance allows for Alternative Futures

I use chance as a method for arriving at or provoking the possibility of an alternative future for thinking and making painting. Chance is a force for forging a path to elsewhere. Without predetermining where I might end up, I perform this operation, or intervention, using Gertrude Stein’s phenomenology of writing:

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”― Gertrude Stein

The writing Is the medium by which something is discovered. To discover is to find (something or someone) unexpectedly or in the course of a search. With this essay, I am not designing persuasions that lead to singular claims or conclusions. Rather, I am writing in alliance with the operation of chance to discover a rule, where the rule is a portal toward the next step in an inquiry. What I hope I am offering is a porous collection of concepts, assembled into a singular essay, yielding nodes for future assemblages.

Splitting

In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes:

The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positions and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations with fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge […] The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another (Haraway,1991:193).

Melanie Klein, in her text Envy & Greed writes:

The Ego is incapable of splitting the object – internal and external – without a corresponding splitting taking place within the Ego... The more sadism prevails in the process of incorporating the object, and the more the object is felt to be in pieces, the more the Ego is in danger of being split’ (Klein, 1946).

I wonder if such a state of splitting can occur in/as a moment of trance.

Trance

What is a trance? It is a spell, a reverie, such that a union occurs with the medium. Pollack said that the painting would work so long as he didn’t lose connection with the painting while he was painting. To sustain the trance long enough that the painting has a chance of becoming is the challenge. It’s about having enough control that one can lose control. Being a conduit or a channel rather than the end-all-be-all-maker. 

Magic Medium

Magic should not be excluded from the thinking of painting. From the making of paintings.

The work of art is therefore a magical creation and, like procreation, it requires, in order to give rise to Being, a psychic charge produced by the spasm of love. This is why there are so few men and so few works that are alive in this world, for magical projection is an extremely difficult act, like that of the total transmission of life; and few beings are capable of accomplishing this mystery of the energetic transfusion of the <volt>. (Cattiaux, 1991: 35-36).

Could it be that splitting is essential to provoking such a <volt>? If I ever achieve it or if I have ever already achieved it, it has been in such a state. To be split, so that I may join with an/other without claiming to be that other. To be in partial connection so that I may be both inside and outside [myself] at the time of creation. The dictionary definition of trance is “a half conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli, typically as induced by hypnosis or entered by a medium.”

I enter the trance through the medium of paint, the material, the matter. 

 To give rise to Being

A painting is a Being and “Being manifests itself continually anew” (Lovitt, 1977; xv) “In true thinking man is used by Being, which needs man as the openness that provides the measure and the bounds for Being’s manifesting of itself in whatever is. Man in thinking is called upon to lend a helping hand to Being” (Lovitt; 1977 xiv). To be used is to be open to letting being become, to letting becoming come into Being. I think that painting is one way in which being can be-becoming. 

On Origins

As a cyborg painter,  I am ultimately searching for an origin that doesn’t exist or won’t come. I am searching for something. Is it origins? Or is it ends? Ends to origins, original ends. Haraway’s cyborg has no need for origins: cyborgs are not reverent; they do not remember the cosmos (1991, 151). Celeste Olalquiaga talks about origins in her essay Third Nature. She’s looking for the logic of origins and how they work in culture. Because we tend to look backward to find the reason- the root.

 On Not Going Back

I seem to have to make my paintings all at once,  as fast as I can. I can’t go back that much, or if I do, just once will do it. More than that and it’s lost and gone. The forms that emerge at the beginning are the most real or they are the most accurate to the Real. 

 How to keep going when the going seems bad

It’s important to state that the going seems bad quite often when we are separated from this state of splitting, when we cannot enter the trance through the medium. 

Writing-Painting

Somehow, things always go back to painting. When I am not painting I think of writing-painting to understand painting. It’s an exercise in making. Creative writing is creative making and texts have form as anything else. A text is an assemblage, connecting to parts. 

 Affective, Awkward Assemblages

I like the contradiction of holding two disparate, incompatible things together in one place, one object, one body.  I like being confronted by something seemingly inverse or antithetical, yet I want these two oppositions to coexist in a kind of symbiosis. There’s that irony again - holding the incompatible things together because they are both true yet contrary. Contrary to truth, I cannot seem to articulate the questions. Affective questions might be the answer. How to feel a painting, how to affect a painting. 

Is symbiosis about making dissimilar forms hold together? Symbiosis: the merging of organisms into new collectives or “the inextricable connectedness of all creatures on the planet”(Thomas, Microcosms, p11)

 Elsewhere is Present 

How to make paintings that go elsewhere. What is elsewhere? Or where is it? The present is a portal to elsewhere. Only when there is pure presence are we capable of pure perception. Here and now. How to invoke the present (through) painting, the continuous present? Painting is essentially stuffed with time. It is about speed and movement, both critical operations of time. The present is so often elsewhere anyway. We are rarely really here. How to re-present. 

 Material and Force

Not abstraction

I do not want to represent anything but to present some thing – something. When I set out to paint I am setting out to empty myself of some thing. These are the things as they are on the paintings themselves. They are not representations. They are “the things themselves”. These do not represent other things, they are themselves the things, the force or the feeling or the expression or, in best-case scenarios, the <volt> that Cattiuax speaks of. These paintings, successful or not although critically engaged in the experience of being made- are only representational in so far as the things themselves exist as themselves. They function as an abstract machine which “does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.” (ATP, 142/177).  In making paintings in this way I am attempting to come into or stumble into a new Real/ity, an alternative or other Real/ity. 

TODAY is the crisis in consciousness

Mina Loy, in her text Aphorisms on Futurism written in 1914, considered the relationship of consciousness to the new form: “CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.” In other words, the form comes first. New form antagonizes consciousness. The mere exposure to such new form irritates or antagonizes consciousness until it expands to the extent needed for incorporating the new form into consciousness. She finishes by saying that “ CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.”

If there is no climax to consciousness, there is no climax to the variety of new forms capable of pushing consciousness into new realms. QUALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS is the task. Exposure to or creation of the new form is one method for provoking this heightened intensity, this degree of quality of consciousness. But what does it mean to seek a “quality of consciousness”? How can we know when something has or is “quality”?

But what are the stakes in all this? The VISIONS we develop, entertain, aspire to are The fantasies we create in order to “BECOME MOVED” (Michael Jackson). Because the things we imagine are the things we create.

(Amplitude: the extent or range of a quality, property, process, or phenomenon)