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studio 1.1: �PAINTING OVER� part one - �The Anxiety of Influence� or �What to Do...� - 4 Mar 2011 to 27 Mar 2011 Current Exhibition |
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ANDY PUTLAND, Hastings and Whore, 2011
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�PAINTING OVER� part one �The Anxiety of Influence� or �What to Do...� 4 - 27 March 2011 private view Thursday 3rd March 6 - 9pm OLIVER BANCROFT, ANDY JACKSON, SARAH MCNULTY, ANDY PUTLAND, DAVID BEN WHITE In the spring of 2010 we presented 16 painters in a show called 'Painting Over', subtitled 'Painting for a Reason (thanks to Johnny Bristol/the Osmonds, no thanks to Boyzone)'. The exhibition was offered as a very personal overview addressing the problem of painting today - taking it for granted there might still be one. In no sense a definitive statement, but a set of suggestions. Provisional lenses through which to view three idiosyncratically partitioned groups of painters. As we said at the time: 'We have isolated a small patch of contemporary painting, the one we're most familiar with and that means most to us. in each group there's abstract, abstraction, and figuration - those divisions are not our present concern.� And without any disrespect to the featured artists we also quoted Cage. 'I have nothing to say and I am saying it. And that is poetry as I need it.' We're now delighted to present an expanded view of the first of those groups under the heading 'The Anxiety of Influence'. Both of which terms deserve an explanation, no doubt. The quote is from literary theorist (and arch-bombast) Harold Bloom who defines as anxiety the relationship authors might have towards those who precede them: a (mis)understanding which leads to a fruitful (re)working. A question of translation much more than imitation, rather as Godard needed to misunderstand classic Hollywood of the fifties to transmute it into the sixties� Nouvelle Vague. In no way a question of nervousness, the anxiety here is exactly the one Picasso talked of as the main thing that matters to us in Cezanne: obsession, maybe, the urge to get it right, possibly without ever knowing what the 'it' is. None of these painters start with a set of assumptions that they can resolve. And leaving aside (at least for the time being) 'obsession', there's the search for matter as well as manner, and the crucial struggle for the two to fit. There's an element of self-consciousness, in the awareness of a tension between what a painting normally does, and what it can be made to do; a battle that can clearly be waged over any terrain at all, where issues of abstract/figuration matter less - don't matter at all. Imitation, referentiality, irony, none of these are in question - the 'influence' at stake involves the artist's relation to paint and to painting, as well as to painting's past. Maybe there�s a luxury painting enjoys, alongside the novel: precisely its state of permanent crisis. Now when anything at all can be a painting (except a drawing) and anything at all can be a drawing (even a painting), painting�s so-called crisis, is quite obviously the mark of the medium�s vitality. studio1.1 57a Redchurch St London E2 7DJ tubes: Shoreditch High St/Liverpool St/Old St bus: 8, 26, 35, 47, 48, 149, 344, 388 email: [email protected] tel: 07952 986696 web: http://www.studio1-1.co.uk open: Wednesday to Sunday 12-6 pm or by appointment |
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