Byron Kim's Threshold
Due to the ongoing conversation here on queer abstraction, I thought it might be illuminating to truck on out to Byron Kim's presentation as part of his Herb
Alpert award at
CalArts. “What does it mean for an artist of color to be making abstract paintings in the 21st century?” is the rhetorical question in his bio-blurb, and I was hoping for some relevance for a different type of outlier artist (queer) to be using a fairly standard modernist trope (abstraction).
The reputation for visiting artists at
CalArts being torn to pieces probably induces some stress, and one strategy seems to be telling amusing tangential anecdotes to keep the the assembled rabble mildly amused. I'll refer to this as the jester strategy, which I've seen work to
varying degrees.
Some anecdotes include the fact that this week's Sunday Painting (a weekly painting project he's been engaged in since 2001) didn't get made until Thursday. He said he's only missed five, presumably because he got all the way to the following Sunday before setting his brush on the canvas. In some ways it seems like a more personal version of On
Kawara's project. Besides his flesh paintings--made famous by their inclusion in the 1993 Whitney Biennial--he's also made details and re-presentations of works by other artists, including Delacroix, David, Van
Gogh,
Morandi, Hopper, and Robert Irwin. His anecdote about the Robert Irwin was about his mistake in converting 153cm listed in the reproduction he was using as a source to 48 inches (correct answer is 60) so his "life-sized" reproduction is 20% smaller than the real thing.
Kim's told the story of
applying for a copyist permit at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art where he painted the corner of
a David painting of the chemist Lavoisier and his wife, who was a student of David's (her drawing portfolio can be seen in the painting's left). The lower left corner Kim painted included the gossamer tulle of her dress, the satin toe of her slipper peeking out, and what Kim called, "a huge beef tongue of red velvet,"
lasciviously lurching out to her toe. David had a thing for the woman, and through his machinations managed to get Lavoisier guillotined, then chased after the widow until
she was forced to move to England. In the end, Kim said it was his "relational piece," (interacting with the guards and tourists) but exhibited the copy at P.S.1's "Not For Sale" show along with the easel.
A question that arose for me was, "Why paint?" Most painters consider the question incredibly
snarky, as if it an unquestionable given, but for Kim's practice it seems like a worthwhile avenue to consider. When thinking about 'Synecdoche,' I couldn't help but think of the TV commercial of the guy who brings a stuffed dinosaur into the hardware store, ostensibly to match the color to paint his child's room. Similar color matching can be done with
Photoshop if one wants to produce rectangles of flesh tone. More on that later.
The other issue I wanted to bring up was around his use of reproductions as a starting point for his own artistic practice. The details he modeled of 'The Church at
Auvers' by Van
Gogh were made from a faded reproduction that hung in his family's home. The anecdote he told around his work 'Delacroix's Shadow,' was of how the artist had hired a cab to take him to the Louvre so he could look at how earlier artists had rendered shadows. The
apocryphal story says that when Delacroix stepped outside, he saw the shadow under the hired cab. It was enough information, so he paid the driver and then went back inside to finish his painting. In Kim's riff, he suspends a band of taxi cab yellow a few inches away from the wall so that the grey
rectangle beneath is divided horizontally into a darker band in the shadow of the protrusion, and a
lighter grey band exposed to the full light of the exhibition space. These starting points seem to downplay the actual artwork as inspiration and source, as if to say the reproduction and a little story are all that's necessary. Likewise it seems that Kim's explanation of the clever bit and the projected
jpeg is enough--maybe even more than I could get from standing in front of his work in a white cube.
At the end, he brought up Ad Reinhardt tautology, "Art-as-art is nothing but art," as an example of how the New York School sucked the personal out of their huge abstract canvases. In some ways his own project is a way to subvert that position. For my personal take, we've already had Pop, Feminism, Minimalism, and about 300 other art movements that have responded to and subverted
AbEx's claims. So nearly a half century later, subverting a Franz Klein seems more about inserting yourself into art history's continuum than any kind of subversive act.
-0-
Back to the question of painting (which I have nothing against). I've come to the idea that painting is process-friendly practice. Especially for something like oil paint; you can keep building up layers, or scrape the whole thing off and start over. You don't have to be Zeus, with a fully formed Minerva springing from your head. For other media like performance, film, video, photography, you really need to have more of a sense of what you're doing before you start the work. A painter has the possibility of pushing paint around, seeing something that looks like a bat,
then deciding to paint a picture of a bat. The photographer would probably head out with a
synch strobe and some spelunking gear to get the same results. Because there's the
possibility for some thought going in, there is the potential of articulated ideas existing before the object. For a painter, the potential for something to emerge organically sets up a different set of circumstances. This isn't to deny the
possibility for other modes of production (like videotaping willy
nilly, without an idea, or a meticulously planned and
executed painting) but instead to propose that some media are more friendly to certain modes of production.
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