When I am in the studio it often feels like composure and focus are more important than anything else and I imagine this to be how a stage performer might feel. Unless I’ve been painting day-in-day-out for a couple of weeks, in which case it’s much more zombie-like, I spend a few minutes getting into the moment, ‘warming up’. I feel I have to be very aware of all of my movements.
It’s something like how Gaston Bachelard describes housework can be: ‘The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions. It even dominates memory. How wonderful it is to really become once more the inventor of a mechanical action!’1
When I think about the performance of painting, I’m put in mind of a story I’ve read in several places about René Magritte - that he painted wearing a suit. I think of the tired notion of Jackson Pollock casually flicking paint about, cavalier, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. I also think of Yves Klein, fully clothed in a suit and bow tie, directing female models to undress, cover themselves in blue paint and writhe around as ‘human brushes’, in performances that are so jarring to look at pictures of. Art history says this was avant garde, but now, to me and to many others, it looks like a very conventional power dynamic.
Then I wonder about the performativity of women painters. I realise I don’t know of any legends surrounding the way that famous women painted, and I feel happy about this. In a reversal of the norm, women painters seem to have kept their personal space (the studio) unseen. Perhaps painting is a place where women’s work can be foregrounded, and not women themselves.
When we were studying together in Glasgow, a friend of mine had been interested in Yves Klein, and she decided to recreate these ‘human paintbrush’ paintings. She painted a friend of ours all over with poster paint and wrapped him up in a cotton sheet, onto which an unfolded impression of his body was made, but barely recognisable through folds and creases. It hung in our living room for two years, the flattened, fragmented imprint of his naked body serving as a curtain for one of the draughty tenement windows.
Performativity now probably happens everywhere, of course. We are all always performing - our gender, our job, our family role. Any separation between private and public has broken down entirely. But artists are also performing their work through their very selves - you are your artwork, and your artwork is you.
Michael Sanchez explains it thus: ‘although art since the recession arguably looks more friendly and less strategic, it is, in fact strategic to the point of paranoia, since it must compete within an increasingly rapid and invasive system of image distribution joined with a system of social surveillance and exchange’2. The theory of networked painting would argue that artworks are deposits of social exchange and relationships, fixed and changeable at the same time, subject to all kinds of contexts, but to Sanchez they are agents or avatars, ‘programmed to connect with the right actors, to get into the right shows, to convey the right profile’3.
This might be nothing new exactly, but as Caroline Busta points out in the same book in a description of Merlin Carpenter’s 2007-2009 ‘blank canvas’ shows, ’by positioning himself as an actor, Carpenter would effectively be casting his guests as an audience - asking them to produce the ultimate semio-capitalist currency - attention’4. People show up for exhibition openings, and Carpenter instrumentalises their presence. What I take from this is that in our late capitalist era, where value is extracted from realms previously thought immune, it is not the artwork that carries value but the attention it is capable of generating5. Semiocapitalism, one way of defining this era, is as Isabelle Graw describes it: ‘a massive integration of our personality, our affects, our social relations, and other non-economical aspects of our lives’ into ‘a power technology that puts our soul to work and aims squarely at our human resources’6.
It’s something like how Gaston Bachelard describes housework can be: ‘The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions. It even dominates memory. How wonderful it is to really become once more the inventor of a mechanical action!’1
When I think about the performance of painting, I’m put in mind of a story I’ve read in several places about René Magritte - that he painted wearing a suit. I think of the tired notion of Jackson Pollock casually flicking paint about, cavalier, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. I also think of Yves Klein, fully clothed in a suit and bow tie, directing female models to undress, cover themselves in blue paint and writhe around as ‘human brushes’, in performances that are so jarring to look at pictures of. Art history says this was avant garde, but now, to me and to many others, it looks like a very conventional power dynamic.
Then I wonder about the performativity of women painters. I realise I don’t know of any legends surrounding the way that famous women painted, and I feel happy about this. In a reversal of the norm, women painters seem to have kept their personal space (the studio) unseen. Perhaps painting is a place where women’s work can be foregrounded, and not women themselves.
When we were studying together in Glasgow, a friend of mine had been interested in Yves Klein, and she decided to recreate these ‘human paintbrush’ paintings. She painted a friend of ours all over with poster paint and wrapped him up in a cotton sheet, onto which an unfolded impression of his body was made, but barely recognisable through folds and creases. It hung in our living room for two years, the flattened, fragmented imprint of his naked body serving as a curtain for one of the draughty tenement windows.
Performativity now probably happens everywhere, of course. We are all always performing - our gender, our job, our family role. Any separation between private and public has broken down entirely. But artists are also performing their work through their very selves - you are your artwork, and your artwork is you.
Michael Sanchez explains it thus: ‘although art since the recession arguably looks more friendly and less strategic, it is, in fact strategic to the point of paranoia, since it must compete within an increasingly rapid and invasive system of image distribution joined with a system of social surveillance and exchange’2. The theory of networked painting would argue that artworks are deposits of social exchange and relationships, fixed and changeable at the same time, subject to all kinds of contexts, but to Sanchez they are agents or avatars, ‘programmed to connect with the right actors, to get into the right shows, to convey the right profile’3.
This might be nothing new exactly, but as Caroline Busta points out in the same book in a description of Merlin Carpenter’s 2007-2009 ‘blank canvas’ shows, ’by positioning himself as an actor, Carpenter would effectively be casting his guests as an audience - asking them to produce the ultimate semio-capitalist currency - attention’4. People show up for exhibition openings, and Carpenter instrumentalises their presence. What I take from this is that in our late capitalist era, where value is extracted from realms previously thought immune, it is not the artwork that carries value but the attention it is capable of generating5. Semiocapitalism, one way of defining this era, is as Isabelle Graw describes it: ‘a massive integration of our personality, our affects, our social relations, and other non-economical aspects of our lives’ into ‘a power technology that puts our soul to work and aims squarely at our human resources’6.
1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. By Maria Jolas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) p67
2. Michael Sanchez, ‘Contemporary Art, Daily’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p54
3. Michael Sanchez, ‘Contemporary Art, Daily’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p56
4. Caroline Busta, ‘Body Doubles’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p44
5. When people ask me what I think about propaganda paintings, I think about this. To me, this use of painting to mobilise attention is much more reminiscent of propaganda than any evocation of social realist aesthetics.
6. Isabelle Graw, ‘Introduction: When Objecthood turns into Subjecthood’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p17
2. Michael Sanchez, ‘Contemporary Art, Daily’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p54
3. Michael Sanchez, ‘Contemporary Art, Daily’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p56
4. Caroline Busta, ‘Body Doubles’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p44
5. When people ask me what I think about propaganda paintings, I think about this. To me, this use of painting to mobilise attention is much more reminiscent of propaganda than any evocation of social realist aesthetics.
6. Isabelle Graw, ‘Introduction: When Objecthood turns into Subjecthood’ in Art & Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism, ed. by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum and Nikolaus Hirsch (Sternberg: Frankfurt, 2011) p17