In consideration of the tools of the artist, I have found myself at perhaps the base of it all. The canvas. The foundation upon which most modern era art works have been realized. In this I mean paintings created since the turn of the previous century-thereabouts; Cezanne, Monet, Matisse, and Picasso.
The work as movable object became tangible during the Renaissance. Previous to this artists earned their way busily fresco-ing churches and domes, ceilings, and walls, etc. Basically buildings of the corporate or individual rich; the Church, the Medici’s, and so on. If you had a private church or chapel on your property chances are you had a wall painted with a scene of religious contemplation. It was Sovereign. Art was not yet a painted canvas, hung on a wall...that would soon change.
So then what of the person who had a more subtle domain, and not the riches affording them a painted wall? When canvas was stretched upon a frame and artists began to paint scenes of; familial study, or landscapes, or still lifes, or friend such as Mona Lisa, they did so toward a personal aim. The focus changed from religious contemplation, to the quotidian. It turned inward. Man was Sovereign. Sovereignty was brought into the work through the artist, it was not searched for in a pictorial emulation of the Holy. The needed outlet of sharing this Enlightenment, through a visual medium, was transformed. This then could be transported from one location to another, and the birth of Art as commerce, personal gain for pleasure or otherwise, grew.
The second most considerable advent was tin tubes. The painter could then contain their colors in travel size, handleable containers, and go afield to work. Think Van Gogh in the countryside, or seashore.
And then there was the photograph. Why would one have any need to render in paint for future times a mother and daughter, a king or pet, home or tree grove? A photograph can do it for you in the click of a shutter, capturing the bounced light from the scene before it on film. The film is developed, making a negative. The negative has light projected through it onto a photographic plate; paper or other, and through a chemical bath, is brought forth in two dimensional life. I distill this here, even though superficially simply, to illustrate how a photograph actually works. This illustration becomes important to the work I am currently invested in.
When a person living today, the 21st Century, makes a picture with most likely a device also used for phone calls, internet use, and textual sharing, they are capturing an image in digital form; zero’s and one’s, and not taking a photograph. They are taking an image. The only similarity this has to a photograph resides in what they choose to include, and not, in the two dimensional frame of the image captured. What they include when cropping the image, and what they do not include when they aim the phone. Most do not consider they are creating based on what they decide to not include in this picture, but nonetheless, it is a choice unconscious or otherwise. The Photographer is aware of this, however, and what you don’t see when looking upon their photographs, is as large a part of what is created as what you see.
So now we are here, in the year 2016. The unending present. The continual present which began at the turn of the 1900’s, and sped up during the time from I would specifically like to argue, the 1950’s, to now.
Other than technology, what has changed since the 1950’s in Art? In our Theatre, our Books, our Music, our Movies? The means to continue to express something ineffable through differing media has remained unchanged since artists began to make works, so why take another photograph? Why throw another pot, write a drama, film a movie, record a song, choreograph a dance? What new is the artist, the composer, the potter, the painter, the writer, the actor, the choreographer, bringing to the table?
We are now back to the tools of the artist. What new can one create using the same tools? Here for me, the paint, the brush, the canvas, are my basic tools. In 2014 I began to wonder of the everyday object. The quotidian. The average. The still life of objects in our homes, workplace, mall. Having no need to capture in a photograph (it has already been done), a painting (it has already been done), a story (it has already been done), I wondered what could I bring to the table, anew? I turned to my tools, and was most drawn to the canvas. Canvas is incredible. It is sturdy, it is nearly non-colored, but oh so beautiful in its color, and it is malleable. I began to make everyday objects using just canvas, sculpting into a three dimensional form; a designer shopping bag, a McDonald’s Meal, a pair of sneakers (including the box containing them), a tissue box, specific books, a wind-chime. In their silence and form they are small wonders. They are all usable. One can pick them up, fill them, carry them, turn their pages, gently push their stems creating a chime specific to itself, and in doing so take an object, created from the innumerable quotidian, and see the special, the specific, the one of a kind. The machine Andy Warhol created has here been denied. The two dimensional plane Matisse worked so diligently to transpose has been lifted and brought into the space the body lives within.
I read the critical theories of Dave Hickey (The Invisible Dragon), John Roberts (Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde), Thierry de Duve (Kant After Duchamp), Rosalind E. Krauss (The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths), Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation and Other Essays), Michele Foucault (Manet and the Object of Painting, and several essays), Jacques Ranciere (The Future of the Image), and essays by Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Lawson, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Clement Greenberg, and most notable, Walter Benjamin. For me though, the most significant work was brought through the ideas of de Duve. It was here I was able to re-consider the canvas. Most notably, the Blank Canvas. The Blank Canvas, which hung upon a Wall, could cause one to re-propose, beginning with I would argue Matisse, in his 1918 painting, The Black Shawl, through Duchamp’s, Fountain, and finishing with, let’s say Lucifer, by Jackson Pollock.
Matisse indicated the three separate fields he was rendering. The Wall, the Floor, and a form in between these two. Upon the Floor, a woman rests. Behind the woman is a Wall. These make up three dimensions of space, in real life. But in a painting, Matisse bisects all three points, and allows the two dimensional field of the canvas stretched over a wood frame, to be just that. A flat space where all three points collide. The viewer creates the remainder.
Duchamp dismissed all before him entirely in his work Fountain. Instead he focused his eye on the working of the art world. The Gallery, the Committee, the Museum, the Media, i.e., the Papers. Through manipulation of these, he pointed his finger, and through choice, deemed a machine produced, mass-created urinal, and turning it upside down he signed it, creating Fountain.
Jackson Pollock, although certainly not the first to do so, allowed paint to be the subject, but perhaps most famously so in his drip paintings. The casualty; literally I mean casual and its recourse; movement of his hand holding a paint-full brush, over the canvas laid upon the floor, put into object action the work of Matisse. He evidenced most fluidly, the subject was paint, and made it exciting.
And so where am I? How do I bring myself to this table? What do I have to offer? Who am I?
Our images are created and socially-mediated, perhaps millions of times a second through Instagram, to name just one such avenue. Our televisions, previously having taken up an enormous amount of three dimensional space in the home, now flatten themselves and are hung on the wall. The Wall previously saved for painting. A painting one could move from place to place, and not have need for what riches would provide in a personal chapel’s frescoed walls, within privately-owned lands. Everyone could hang a painting, or photograph, on their Wall.
Today, with HD flat-screened images Netflixed 24-7 on an expanse of Wall for viewers contemplation, through bingeing of regurgitated images and stories, none of them original in any manner, where is the painting?
I was a student of fashion. I majored in Women’s Fashion Design at F.I.T., where I learned to drape on dress-form in muslin (the slighter cousin of canvas), three dimensionally. I had to think about this as I wondered on the painting, the blank canvas which I loved so much, and all the giant flat televisions people watched, and hand-held devices of images they scrolled through.
It seemed almost easy to me, the creative impulse then, to form three dimensionally, canvas, using the wood frame as base, and re-place it upon the Wall. It allowed me to conclude and bring to the Table of Art, and all its History, something new. Something when hung upon a Wall, took up space. Rendered images, abstract or otherwise, with; blank canvas, shadow, highlight, depth, projection, the unseen, and the seen. Something to be contemplated. Not unlike a religious scene on a frescoed wall. An attempt to create a three dimensional image from a two dimensional one, an abstract. All of them, containing Sovereignty.
Michael Gardner
Canvas #8
25" x 29" x 14"
2016
