By: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 16:45:00 +0000

Andy Warhol was an illustrator. Illustrators make work that is destined to be reproduced in print, on an uninflected ground, white paper. Painting in contrast can and traditionally always does involve a specific ground, inflected and defined in a certain way. Warhol’s first show (1956) may have been seen to be campy, in the terms defined by Susan Sontag, but was not as far as I know thought of as such because of its relationship to painting. This would happen once he made paintings that used the techniques he’d developed in his commercial work. For some, the three artists in this show among them, since and because of works like the Elvis silk-screen painting (1963,) together with the work of Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, painting has aspired to the condition of the printed, and most particularly the photographic in a variety of manifestations. Clement Greenberg followed Hegel and Kant in seeking to think about painting through what it specifically was and could do, now it is pursued through what it specifically is not, and what that allows it to do. Mejian compares Wool’s use of the image of the pixel with Lichtenstein’s of the Ben-Day dot. Guyton seems to me to be slightly different from the other two in that his work feels born of the computer and the television screen rather than the older print technologies. I think this worth noting because one is always in danger of explaining away the most recent technological affect by way of its predecessors.
Joe Masheck, in a corrective monograph about Adolf Loos that only he could write, quotes Don Judd lamenting the substitution of allusion for affect in postmodernism and saying, in 1984, that “Everything is to be read, nothing is to be appreciated.” That is a long time ago now, and 1963 is nineteen years earlier. That being so I am not sure what Ara H. Mejian means when he describes this show as “striking” in his first sentence. The black and white paintings faintly recall Franz Kline’s because of their size (in addition to being black and white,) and perhaps that is an allusion that was on Andy’s mind when, as the gallery notes tell us, he turned to abstract painting in his last few years. None of us will miss the reminder that Kline made those paintings with the help of an overhead projector. I’m not sure that rises to the level of ‘striking,’ though. The show makes use of the idea of an ‘autonomous’ brushstroke, but what is meant by that is one that’s made by a machine rather than by hand. There’s nothing less autonomous than a machine, human design being at its source and what defines it and its purpose. The word ‘autonomy’ is used to separate the impassivity of Andy’s and his descendants’ surfaces from the impassioned (as the myth has it) brushwork of (some of) the New York School painters, an allusion to the received and bowdlerized version of Greenberg’s use of the term to which we have become as habituated as we have to silk-screen and the photographic as constituents of paintings. Regarding the latter techniques and the approach to (and critique of) painting which they are said to embody, what was striking in 1963 can’t really be striking in the same way fifty or more years later, either as a thought (gesture) or a phenomenal event. This is why I wonder what it means here. What strikes me is that fifty years is a long time for an aspiration to remain fashionable. By all means the market has something to do with it, as does the sloth and vulgar ambition of intellectuals. ‘Stuck’ seems a more appropriate word than ‘struck’.

1. See my “What Does Tom Mitchell Want?” Los Angeles Review of Books (November 2015), which is a review of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2015.)

2. Joseph Masheck, Adolf Loos, The Art of Architecture (London and New York: Taurus, 2013) p.253.

Comments on: Autonomous Brushwork: Warhol, Wool, Guyton at Nahmad Contemporary

By: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe