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Pictorial Striptease: On David Reed and His Painting: #467, 2000
Published in David Reed: You Look Good in Blue, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, 2001.
Konrad Bitterli
“ ‘… if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft–science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence — the subject of criticism and not its object. And this,’ I concluded rather grandly, ‘is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect — to the rhetoric of how things look — to the iconography of desire — in a word, to beauty.’ ”
David Hickey1
Dozens of tightly packed, unfinished canvases stand propped in the recesses of the New York studio; some of them stacked neatly edge to edge, others hung next to one another on the wall or laid across sawhorses and trestles. Scattered around the different rooms — a wet room for painting, a sanding room, a storage and a presentation room — paintings in various stages of completion are found. Some have the first casually expansive gestures freshly set on colored grounds. Some have complicated overlapping movements, and are waiting for their final form. Other painted surfaces can be seen that have been rejected after an intense perusal. These stand partly sanded down in a separate area of the studio, awaiting preparation for a new try. There is one thing that is immediately evident in one’s passage through the studio: the painting processes that lead David Reed to his pictorial solutions are intensely complex.
David Reed’s actual creative process is determined not only by the classical principle of addition: by a continual application of single paint layers with brush or painting knife. Rather it is defined just as much by a subtractive procedure, by testing and rejecting already existing forms: by selective sanding and revision. The transformation and combination of individual ideas of form will end in varied interlocked images that in the context of contemporary painting are distinguished by their idiosyncratic and original structures. Such a specific configuration will be analyzed in detail in painting #467, 2000, which I would like to subject to a “reading.” Such an attempt, which can only show one possible way seeing the painting, must remain speculative, for Reed, like almost no other representative of contemporary painting, manages to allow single work phases to become visible on canvas only to overlay them again, covering the surface with a smooth–as–glass, almost photographic–looking process. In deciphering the work, therefore, this strategy of both revealing and concealing must be justly represented. Uncovering pictorial structures becomes a kind of striptease, a simultaneous strip and tease process of both painterly clarification and painterly camouflage: a pleasurable, even erotic approach to painting that is itself extraordinarily sensuous.
Viewing without a handhold
The swing and momentum of the color structures in Reed’s painting #467, 2000, seem to loop endlessly into one another. Sweeping and meandering, countless gestures of ever newly initiated paint–strokes penetrate and engorge each other, until — aimless, stranded — they seem to lose their way on the extremely elongated picture plane. Red paint trails are concentrated into dense bulging concentrations of color, only to dissolve somewhere else into a delicate gossamer film melting into a surface of yellow. These thick vast swirls can thereby hold and stress form, or instead, as visual accents, spring forward from the totality of the picture. Movement and counter–movement seem to collide on the canvas, deposit themselves in layers and spread into the fictional picture plane. From out of this spatial illusion, individual paint marks rise to the surface to become momentarily present at the uppermost level. In some places they tarry, a transparent wash of color, while in others they abruptly well up to the surface and surf, as if over submarine waves.
In a highly–charged triad, the primary colors of red, yellow and blue are placed alongside and over each other in various combinations — intensifying from an endless play of forms into a soundless symphony of color. Pulsations, blood–red and yellow vie with each other for luminosity. The turquoise blue of the brushmarks, applied on the ground of yellow to white bands, contrasts powerfully with this ephemeral light. Sections of the picture with denser layers of red and blue fleetingly suggest mysterious depth and collide directly with zones of fire–engine red that remain pure gloss. Not only the sediment of layers of paint and form, but also the sheer luminosity of the paint evoke a feeling of spatiality. This intricate play guides us into the innermost depth of the picture as well as expanding it into the actual space of our everyday world: a sensuously bewitching color–and–light shimmer radiates from the painting.
Words are inadequate to describe the inner drama that is revealed — dynamic movements and violent color collisions, rippling folds and spatial warps, expanses of light and shade. The painting with its all–over pattern seems in permanent oscillation. The short abrupt paint gestures and powerful forward–projected color placements lend the pictorial structure a dynamism that overtaxes our visual faculties, and neither the searching eye nor a systematizing rationality is given a handhold: a seemingly inextricable chaos of color and form. And yet a closer inspection of the way the picture is laid out horizontally reveals that there are clear structures, and the sum of the parts seems much less confusing. Thus on the picture’s longitudinal axis there are conspicuous light traps that one could characterize as organic variations. Despite the variety of densities of the transparent overpainting, these light traps stand out against the ground as their luminosity contrasts with the surrounding dark zones. To the left the itinerary begins with a bright yellow oval in the upper corner and the shrill blue swirl embedded in it, a kind of abbreviated calligraphic character. This leads into another inner shape, a finely organized “head” with a down–turned, whip–like attachment, which is followed in the center of the picture by a mighty, recumbent S–curve. Overlaid with horizontal swinging ornaments in translucent red over the banded yellow to white ground, the shape seems to enclose a painterly construct, an eruptive brushmark in blue. These variations in form are concluded on the right by another curvilinear figure, whose swing from out of the center leads to the paintings upper edge where it breaks off abruptly. Like the adjacent gesture, this abbreviated gesture seems to be flooded in a bright shaft of light. The lighter inner structures that give rhythm to the picture horizontally, however, do not in any way serve a playful end–in–itself, but set off the essential basic elements in Reed’s painting: the artistic gesture and its formalization as ornament.
Gestures: mediated and unmediated
The free painterly gesture and the fixed geometric grid — as formal poles they have determined the Modernist discourse for decades. If the latter stands for rationally establishable compositional systems, the first is a synonym for a primary expression of human existence. Its origin in the spontaneous paintstrokes of Kandinsky’s “Improvisations” peaked in Abstract Expressionism, especially in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. The vehemence of his painting was often interpreted as an expression of inner impulses, as a seismogram of existential dereliction. Symbolizing artistic freedom and social liberation, the gesture, especially against the background of the Cold War, underwent unintended political and ideological interpretations. Even more basically, it is to be seen as an elemental painterly movement, as handwriting, in that it underlines the aura of the original and the role of the artist as a genuine creator, thus confirming, as its logical consequence, painting’s traditional categories. Having grown up during the heroic phase of the abstract painting of the 50s and 60s, Reed in his art may well greet an unreserved belief in the originality of artistic creation with nothing but skepticism. A survey of the artist’s oeuvre shows us how important the meaning of the gesture is. Already in his early works — in his so–called “Brushmark Paintings” — it appears in fact as a basic element of his abstract vocabulary (#46, 1974) in which the process of painting, i.e., the application of paint to the support, becomes visible in its most direct form. With simple brushstrokes the artist applies several horizontal lines of black paint onto a wet white ground. The, in itself, unstructured brush mark is only broken by the fine split that results from it being made over two tall vertical canvases bolted together side by side. This inner division of the brushmark — together with the directional flow of the paint material — assures a pictorial structure beyond any conventional compositional model. The brushed application of color is a portrait of itself, becomes itself the pictorial object like the quotation of a gesture.
By means of such strictly staged seriation and duplication, the painting evades any kind of expression; as a sober postulation it serves to make a process visible and distances itself to a great degree from the archetype of the handwritten. Introduced as a quotation, Reed’s gesture, his painting, becomes a reflection on painting through the medium of painting. In the end, such a conceptual approach lies at the logical core of the art of the Seventies and its basic questioning of art genres, especially that of the easel painting. By painting a portrait of brushwork per se, Reed’s work takes its bearings essentially from the positions of that era’s Process Art.
This conceptual standpoint vis–à–vis painting comes decisively to a head in the following years. In his so–called “Multi–Panel Paintings,” works dating from 1976, the artist confronts single, solitary–placed paint gestures — black on white or white on black — with colored, mostly monochrome canvases. Thus he links different picture traditions, namely, the gestural with monochrome painting. On the combined canvases a rivalry between contradictory aesthetic codes is staged, which in the following years continued to mark Reed’s work. However, this conflict inherent in his painting is no longer manifest as dialectical opposition. It is formulated as subtle “picture–in–picture combinatorics”2 of the most varied formal possibilities, from the gestural to the geometric, that all — and this is what is so fascinating about the work — merges into a complex and yet coherent pictorial structure.
In painting #467, a reinterpretation of the kind of painting structures he previously developed takes place. The constructive system — the picture’s geometry — that until now provided the pictorial framework is suppressed in favor of an unfixed, all–over structure and sweeping gestural movements. The gesture as quotation and ornament celebrates its triumph with a flourish.
Arabesques and ornaments
“Ornament and Crime” was the title Alfred Loos used at Modernism’s inception. Against the background of the voluptuous Jugendstil, what he objected to with this title, turned into the intellectual foundation and the legitimization of abstract art in Wilhem Worringer’s publication from the same period, “Abstraktion und Einfühlung” (Abstraction and Empathy). In Worringer’s argument the tendency to abstraction, following cultural history, is from ornamentation. Yet the pioneers of Modernism from Kandinsky to Mondrian feared nothing more than the disparagement of what they understood to be a revolutionary pictorial vocabulary as pure decoration, as pure surface and fleeting appearance.
At the end of Modernism, the ornament in art is being thematized once again. As clearly manifested in #467, this is what Reed’s consciously–placed gestures do. These shorthand calligraphic gestures become emblematic, interchangeable elements of form — a copy of a gesture. The thinking that underlies this strategy sees the vocabulary of Modernism as potentially available materials for structure and therefore as historical. The renunciation of a modernist search for form is, however, not at all to be seen as a betrayal of Modernism — as has been sometimes critically argued — but, quite to the contrary, sets up the possibility of its fundamental renewal, the potential for a redefinition of abstract painting.
A predilection to ornamentation remains tangible in Reed’s painting, especially in his strikingly painterly passages. As arabesque elements, their stylization recalls late medieval draped folds, and their artificial lighting, Rococo embellishment. Above all, on the basis of their wide–flung dynamism, they reinforce the totality of the picture’s surface and its horizontally. This points to the characteristic relation to film that, as mediated perception, is a prerequisite of Reed’s wide–screen landscapes. At the same time, the picture format also refers back to a visual experience that is essentially oriented towards the linear, and recalls the reading of a frieze, which in turn ties it logically to the ornamental. Moreover, the red and blue wave forms of #467 basically constitute a decorative pattern that covers the entire pictorial field and transforms the classical all–over of postwar art into a calculated meta–structure.
Shameless beauty
Mediated and unmediated gestures, decorative arabesques and modernist all–over — Reed’s paintings are easily deconstructed mentally. That is what makes them seem so eminently up–to–date. “In painting since then there have only been more pictures after the last picture, and these pictures after the last picture cannot thrive on the illusion that there will be no more pictures ahead, no pictures without an origin, a reason, a history.”3 With its historization and conceptualization, contemporary painting opens up an additional horizon for possible fields of operation that range from cultural history to the media–defined present. All of these possibilities can be found in Reed’s art, thereby putting them into the picture.
However, an analytical approach can in no way explain the fascination that radiates from Reed’s art. Formulated as a thesis, this lies in its outright, shameless beauty, a beauty based on an unbridled use of the ornamental, on the “Ornamentalisation of Modernism.”4 Arabesques, scrolls, embellishment: culturally and historically they served to decorate a form, to embellish a function. In Reed’s art via a subtle transformation of cultural set pieces, styling per se is displayed as content; surface appearance is the goal of the picture. And the question thus posed is one of the beauty of the form, which — if we follow the argument of the critic Dave Hickey — has regained its scandalous potential: “Yet the vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change in this civilization. Mapplethorpe uses it, as does Warhol, as does Ruscha, to engage individuals within or without the cultural ghetto in arguments about what is good and what is beautiful.”5 As a sensuous–erotic presence of color and form, this is exactly what David Reed’s art manages to achieve.
1 Dave Hickey, “Enter the Dragon. On the Vernacular of Beauty,” in Idem, The Invisible Dragon. Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: 1993) p 12.
2 Thomas Dreher, “Antiquiertheit der Malerei?“ in Peter Weibel (ed.), Pittura / Immedia. Malerei in den 90er Jahren (Graz: Neue Galerie, 1995) p 31.
3 Peter Weibel, “Pittura / Immedia. Die Malerei in den 90er Jahren zwischen mediatisierter Visualität und Visualität im Kontext,” in Pittura / Immedia, see fn. 2, p 17.
4 Markus Brüderlin, “Ornamentalisation of Modernism — Painting in the Eighties and Nineties,” in Idem (ed.), Ornament and Abstraction (Riehen / Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2001) p 205.
5 See fn. 1, p 24.