I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
During the late ’50s, ’60s, Rothko was the first, I guess, to make the point that painting was an esthetic object. That point was made over and over again through the ’60s (I’m talking about abstract painters) and I had done it myself. The point had really been gotten across strongly that painting was an object. So, I wanted to make a painting getting the paint across. That’s really what a painting is basically about, whether you talk about figurative painting or abstract painting, when you really get down to it. I wanted to point out the paint and the paint surface and not so much the objectness. Of course, they are always objects. Any painting is an object; there’s no question about that. You can’t get away from that.
Robert Ryman, An Interview with Robert Ryman [Artforum]
Before mid-twentieth century abstraction, paintings were not seen primarily as objects. Instead they were treated as windows into scenes, emotions, or narratives—as referring to things beyond themselves. Mark Rothko and others suggested that a painting is not a window or a referent to something else. Instead, a painting is a thing in the world, an aesthetic object.
Ryman was working at a time this was already accepted. He shifted attention from a painting as an aesthetic object to the materials making the painting up: the paint, the paint surface, and the techniques used to apply the paint onto the surface.
Ryman says process is fundamental to his painting:
How is your work related to the process of its being made?
It has everything to do with it. When I begin, I’m never quite sure what the result is going to be. The process is actually making the painting, that’s all. I don’t have a plan beforehand. I have a certain concept, a certain feeling of what I want. There are certain esthetic problems that I want to solve. Sure, that’s a beginning. When I start doing it, I discover things that I hadn’t thought could be there; I changeit later on, until I end up with the final result, the final painting which I consider to be finished. That’s done.
And yet, seemingly paradoxically, he says the subject of his paintings is not the process:
Do you think the process involved in your work might be called the subject matter?
No. Of course, it’s always interesting to know what the process is. It’s like when you listen to some music—a Bartok quartet. You’re not really too concerned about what he was doing with the music; you’re not too concerned with how the quartet is interpreting his music; how the violinist is interpreting. You just listen to it and you’re either moved by it or not, depending on how you’re feeling or what you’re thinking. Of course, it’s always interesting to know if you really want to go into it, if you’re an art historian or a scholar. It makes the work much more by going into the process and the why and the how and when. But it’s not essential at all. The main thing is you just look at it and you see or you have a feeling about it or not. That’s what’s important.
The process is the cause of the painting’s existence as it is. The painting that results is the consequence of the process. The painting can only exist the way it does because of the particular process used to create it. But the painting is not about the process.
Picking up my musings about AI and painting yesterday, we see that AI-generated images can simulate the appearance of a real-world physical painting process, but there is no causal chain of physical action (the dragging of the brush filled with paint against the support, wrong directions that are made and then covered up, layers of paint laid atop each other such that underlayers are obscured). The image is not consequential. It is not the consequence of a real-world process. It is the consequence of a statistical, digital process.
I have started a new series of white paintings, somewhat inspired by Ryman and mostly inspired by my wish to take my painting in a more minimalist and interesting direction. Initially I thought maybe these paintings would be about the process I used to make them. But that is unsatisfying because it creates paintings that are more didactic than immediately experiential.
Ultimately I want someone to look at a painting and feel a sense of wonder, or confusion, or surprise. I want them to feel immersed in the viewing and experience of it. This can be achieved via process, via the way I choose a canvas (or other support) and paint, the way I lay down paint, the decisions I make, how I declare a painting done.