John Chilver, from exhibition catalogue, Galeria Thomas Cohn, São Paulo, 2001
John Chilver’s painting has entered a new phase. The good-looking early work now appears prematurely settled. In the current paintings new questions are being raised about prior solutions. Chilver has not abandoned his former principles but stretched and skewed them into unfamiliar version of themselves. In other words, Chilver’s studio practice has shown it is on the side of inquiry rather than the commodification of style.
Characteristic of Chilver’s early paintings was the presence of two conceptually equivalent but visually uneven forces, namely monochrome and figuration. Détente between these formally opposed elements was not helped by Chilver’s decision to render the gesture in chunky extruded marks that from pictorial content. Postmodernists call this, in its standard mode, double-coding – a phrase which conveniently wipes the tension out of the encounter. The combination in Chilver’s painting promised something much more gruelling. In principle, the works ought to have torn themselves apart due to the uncompromising strain between their elements. All-out self-destruction was prevented by the ease with which monochrome can stand for, or be confused with, background. In this way, Chilver’s paintings are amongst other things, investigations into a specifically modernist preoccupation with figure and ground. What makes them interesting is that they go against the grain of the best modernist opinion on the subject.
Some extended comments on the history and grammar of the figure-ground relation are in order to prepare the way for a fuller discussion of some of the central issues of Chilver’s painting. So, what constitutes the figure-ground relation? Before modernism, it was possible for an amateur painter to be chastised for painting a picture without a ground because the term referred to the actual surface layer painted onto the surface of the support, acting as a bed for the paint to lie on. In modernist painting, ground is transposed into a visual aspect, rather than a hidden technical one. Matisse is the artist who owes most to the drama of figure-ground relations (or the artist who taught us most about this drama), while Picasso and Braque, in a prompt response, are its first radical detractors. Every line in Matisse is a cut, dividing figure from ground, whereas every line in Cubism is a fold, bringing figure and ground into unstable contact.
The visual partner of figure, ground, is at once an absence (of figure) and the ne plus ultra of all figuration. Ground is, in poststructuralist parlance, the limiting condition of figure. It is the unaccented power by which the figure is conferred. Like a book’s preface, which is typically the last written word placed first, the ground is not an empirical fist layer (chronology) but a grammatical or optical one. Hans Hofmann’s sport of ‘push and pull’ tirelessly rediscovers the primacy of grammar over chronology in a labour of perpetual fascination – as if he couldn’t believe his luck. Figure-ground, in American modernism, is the key to painting’s vitality – but only when painters try to do without it.
Greenberg’s speculations about flatness, if fully realized, would amount to the erasure of figure-ground. Flatness is, in this sense, a special sort of reconciliation between these two opposing sources of pictorial space, reducing to zero the optical gap that pulls the figure away from the ground. At zero, though, it makes no sense to talk about figure or ground at all, which is why Greenberg was ever vigilant to insist that flatness could not be fully realized without losing everything. “The flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself”, he wrote, “can never be an utter flatness”. Consequently, flatness is Greenberg’s pact with figure-ground: his preservation of the figure-ground dynamic on the condition that it be threatened with abolition. By calling for its negation, therefore, Greenberg put figure-ground at the top of painting’s agenda.
With this in mind, it is clear why Greenberg felt it necessary to play down the value of abstraction in the painting he supported. An abstract figure on an abstract ground is, in principle, no better than a representational one. An abstract figure is a figure all the same. What is being called for is not abstraction, but something approaching nonfiguration. Nonfiguration, not abstraction, is the flattening of the figure-ground dialectic. Nonfiguration is the negation or loss of figuration, of the relationship between figure and ground which is the enabling condition of the figure, and thus the negation of loss of the ground, also. And yet, while there has been a good amount of literature on nonfiguration, there is not even a given term for the negation or loss of the ground. This is because the relationship between figure and ground has always been framed inequitably in favour of the figure. Although one of the core projects of modernist painting has been to unpack the mastery of the figure in the figure-ground relationship, the figure remains the positive term in modernist discourse, as the aspect of the duality that the negation of the duality negates.
When Minimalism hung the optical off the literal, the drama of figure-ground had a diminished role, but could still be found lurking in the unreconciled distinction between, for instance, support and shape, or unit and totality (so much so, it could be argued, that the way prefabricated units add up to a uniform totality is Minimalism’s version of ‘push and pull’ – the units precede the totality but have the optical effect of sitting on a uniform ground that they produce). For the most part, though, Minimalism was content to believe that the optical effects of figure-ground had been ousted by literalism. This mistaken or mythical rejection of figure-ground in
Minimalism is present, also, in the longer tradition of the monochrome. It is perhaps the historical monochrome that Greenberg had in mind when he warned of the price of a fully realized flatness. A painting without incident is a painting without painting, which is why Malevich and Rodchenko couldn’t resist while Greenberg and Fried couldn’t see the point.
The precise status of the monochrome vis-à-vis the dialogue of figure and ground is vital to Chilver’s early paintings in which the monochrome appears. The status of the monochrome is instructive, also, for the recent paintings, in which the monochrome has been replaced with more complex and difficult combinations. Let me start by saying that I don’t think we can take for granted the assessment of the monochrome as the historical moment when painting transcends figure-ground. Insofar as the wizardry of illusionistic picture-making is reduced to nothing or near-nothing in the monochrome, it is legitimate to regard the monochrome as engaged in a promise of critique and refusal. Its critique, however, remains unfulfilled. Painting continued regardless of the monochrome’s stern manifesto of painting’s exhaustion in revolutionary Russia. Perhaps we would want to say that the avant-garde remaindering of painting or picture-making was always bound up with a political radicalism, and therefore that the continuation of painting after the monochrome takes nothing, or very little from the formal or technical achievements of the monochrome. Do we want to say, then, that the historical continuation of painting and picture-making after the monochrome means merely that its erasure of figuration is a private virtue rather than a historical one? This is a false refinement, however, because if we subtract the historical element from the antagonistic relationship between the monochrome and the antecedent tradition of pictorial painting, then the confrontation is lost and the transcendence is lost with it.
The monochrome no more transcends figure-ground than a worm transcends flight. Certainly, there is an element of renunciation involved in the tradition of the monochrome, and one part of that renunciation is a turning away from figure-ground in general and figuration in particular, but the monochrome does not accomplish this renunciation; it serves as an emblem of it. Consider what the monochrome must do in order to transcend figure-ground. Is not the monochrome valued precisely for doing just nothing, for being empty of all pictorial incident, gesture, form? If you are tempted to say that what the monochrome does is empty the canvas, or erase its content, then you are speaking of its historical confrontation with pictorial art, not what it does technically, formally or optically. Fried makes a similar point in his tightly argued essay ‘Art and Objecthood’ in reference to the suggestion, by Greenberg, that a blank canvas might be regarded as art. A blank canvas is only trivially or nominally a painting, Fried argued against his mentor. What he called for was always surplus to the literalness of painting’s reductive essence; he wanted the painting to acknowledge its literal support, not merely reduce itself to that literal support. As such, we might suggest that the monochrome does not trade in figuration or figure-ground dynamics, but neither does it acknowledge or engage critically with the figuration that it excludes. The monochrome is the sentence, not the case for the prosecution.
As a recognisable tradition of nonfigurative refusal, the monochrome has become its own affirmation of a lost avant-gardism and a conventional figure of the erasure of figuration. At the very least, the monochrome is less than it seems. At best, it is a reminder of a defeated or displaced avant-garde critique and is therefore a picture of what painting did not eventually do to itself. In one sense, all painting after the monochrome is a return to painting before the monochrome – and this includes monochrome painting today. In another sense, the persistence of the monochrome seems to be due as much to its historical failure as it does to any elegant solution that it proposes. This is why artists keep doing things to the monochrome. Claus Carstensen spent a lot of time pissing on black monochromes while Terry Atkinson used candy-coloured monochromes as the background or sky for a series of Enola Gay pictures. On Kawara writes things on monochromes, Warhol printed photojournalism on something very similar.
Chilver painted pictures on monochromes. Was this a mistake? Painting since the monochrome, according to Jeff Wall, has always been a return to painting – to painting before the monochrome. The logic seems to be that the monochrome is
painting’s suicide bomber. Only the bomb didn’t go off. Logically or formally, the monochrome is supposed to be painting’s last breath, but historically and institutionally, painting carries on regardless. It is better to say, therefore, that those painters who have been working on the monochrome have done so because it remains conceptually compelling but historically impossible. Spotting the monochrome in contemporary painting does not mean acknowledging its radical refusal, but its actual implausibility. What the monochrome demands is not respect but reworking. This is why it was not a solecism for Chilver, in his early work, to paint pictures on monochromes. Historically, it could be argued, that’s what all painters have been doing since the Russian Revolution. The monochrome, it seems, was asking for it.
Chilver’s recent paintings spurn the monochrome while remaining faithful to the central tension between figure and ground that the monochrome had served. As before, a chronological and optical first layer is prepared in advance of a pictorial and extruded second layer. What sold the monochrome as a suitable first layer was its dual role as both the historical emblem of the disavowal of figure and ground and its appearance, necessary to this, of being a blank, unused canvas. Chilver, then, went on to use it. Optically and conceptually, the monochrome as blank canvas was prefect for the job, but ultimately offered so little resistance to the oncoming figuration that its use was perfunctory. It was like talking in tautologies. Opting for more complex and difficult first layers on which to paint, Chilver has replaced the full stop of the monochrome with a question mark. The result may not always have the self-evidence of a tautology, but it has the advantage of being a richer line of inquiry.
If the driving force of a certain type of modernist painting was the reconciliation of figure and ground in degree zero painting, then, by contrast, postminimalist painting, Chilver’s work included, reflects on the formal distinction between figure and ground as something other than a formal relationship. For instance, if decorate was considered by modernists to be a brand of imbecilism (because decoration necessarily involves the mutual misrecognition of figure and ground, in which the figure is totally ignorant of the ground, and vice versa), postminimalist painters may read the figure-ground relations of decoration as a form of infection, in which an alien body enters and contaminates another. Chilver orchestrates skirmishes between figure and ground not as an academic formal conundrum, but as the lens through which so many of painting’s conceptual and historical issues can be addressed.
Chilver, in effect, makes two paintings within each work. He uses different techniques for each. There is a small group of techniques used for painting the first layer which are not then used for the second layer. The technique for the second layer is invariably the piping of linear pictorial content, but other techniques are finding their way in. Piping, with a modified technique derived from cake icing, Chilver has developed a way of applying paint that has no trace of the brush or hand. It is a mechanical technique and yet it allows movement that is free enough to draw. What’s more Chilver has produced his own range of nozzles for the piping cone so that the paint extrudes from it in distinctive and sharp relief. The marks it produces are square or rectangular in section. The detail is itself a comment on the fragile relationship between figure and ground – always seeming, as it does, a miracle that the thick line of paint clings to the canvas at all. The second layer is in this way the stricter of the two.
Knowing in advance that the second layer is comprised of such crisp technical and conceptual material, the first layer, now that the monochrome has been abandoned, has become a field of liberty. Maybe a conceptually robust figure does not permit, in advance, a licentious ground, but what happens if it does is that the tension and drama between the two is heightened. The effect is not, as it was in the triumph of pre-modernist figure-ground relations, of vigorous spatial illusion. Instead, it dramatizes the relationship between them in order to reveal rather than downplay the difficulties, anxieties and potential of making a mark and violating a mark already made. Chilver’s recent paintings invite comparison with vandalism and graffiti in a way that the monochrome paintings could not because the ground is now a figure in its own right. Chilver has thus lifted the violence – the cut, in Greenberg’s vocabulary – of the mark into visible antagonism with the surface. This is not just an allegory of aggression (although it is certainly that) it is also an occasion for reconsidering the value of the overlooked. There are benefits of being overlooked. Chilver has come to realize that there is liberty in invisibility, and he takes advantage of this in the ‘grounds’ he prepares for his paintings.
One of the ways in which Chilver dramatizes the split between figure and ground
is his own divided regard for them. It is quite clear that Chilver behaves differently with each and that pivotal to that difference is the fact that the figure dominates the ground. What this means is that the ground can accept the dominance of the figure and let down its guard, relax a little. The ground never reaches full inattention or carefree abandon, but it contrasts with the figure, or top layer, as a field of aesthetic play and formal latitude. If Chilver’s paintings probe at the stress between figure and ground, then, they also generate questions about, for instance, our conception of mistake and repair, or embarrassment and pride. Even with the blatant dominance of figure over ground in these paintings, Chilver makes repair a partner with the mistake it would need to overcome, and allows pride only an incomplete suppression of what embarrasses it. The dualities that the paintings bring to mind do not take hold of the paintings; the treatment of figure-ground is not inflexible enough for that. Formally, these paintings prefer a little discomfort rather than premature – we might say foreshortened – closure.
If we regard the ground, or first layer, as a field of liberty, say, it does not follow that the figure that dominates it must be an episode of policing and control. Even if the figure tends to be more organized and disciplined than the ground, it is also, to the extent, the ground’s completion. As well as appearing to be the repressive force that cancels the ground’s anarchic freedom, the figure in Chilver’s paintings is also the ground’s saviour. The looseness of the ground is preserved and protected by the tightness of the figure, which never fully cancels the awkward mayhem underneath. Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Eva Hesse pioneered the contemporary interest in the emergence of soft chaos out of strict, premedicated tasks. Chilver displays these two characteristics but doesn’t tie looseness to the workings of a defensible structure. Chilver’s soft chaos, in the first layer of his paintings, has more independence than the by-products of minimalist systems. He takes full responsibility for them. He calls them his own before (and after) he asserts his better judgement.
The split between figure and ground in Chilver’s work, which doubles as so many cultural and conceptual gashes, is also consistent with another more unexpected distinction. Ernst Gombrich has written about the value of doodles, and especially of doodling, in terms of the opposing criteria for art of, on the one hand, the mastery of skill and design, and on the other, the urge to create and play. The doodle has a long history of sitting alongside the sketches and plans of the great masters. For the doodle to move from the literal margin to the centre of the artistic sentiment and ideology, however, no less was required than the counter-intuitive innovations of modernism. In fact, it was mastery itself that had to go to make way for the expressivism and primitivism, or authenticity and contingency of the doodle. The first layers of Chilver’s paintings have the informality of doodles functioning perhaps like the classic doodle, which liberates the doodler from disturbing and distracting thoughts, all the best to get on with the serious job in hand. Doodling, like listening to music while reading or working, discharges tension and, paradoxically, helps to focus concentration because the distraction is managed. Chilver doesn’t doodle, exactly. In addressing the figure and ground of his paintings on two footings, though, Chilver opens the gap between the proper statement and of the record vernacular that plagues politicians and other professionals who have to protect their careers from their beliefs.
One definition of decoration might be that the ground is a victim of a cruel figure. Decoration is an optical kind of torture in which the figure imposes itself on a ground treated with nothing short of contempt. How can painting include figure and ground without complying with a world of horror, violence and coercion? It is something of this ethical force that animated the historical monochrome and gave it its political weight. The monochrome was a virtuous painting because it entailed no internal hierarchy insofar as it contained no incident, no division, and no inequity. Instead of ridding his paintings of the problematic relation of figure and ground, Chilver’s work explores and undoes the ‘on’ of the perception of the figure on the ground beneath it. The figure is never permitted the comfort of sitting on the ground untroubled. The ground is not docile and submissive but turns against the figure when it can to put a question mark not only over the integrity of the figure but the authority and legitimacy of its place ‘on’ or ‘over’ the ground. If, from a strict modernist point of view, there is too much independence of figure and ground in Chilver’s painting, this is because Chilver does not accept that the dominant and positive figure can always have it his own way. Instead of thinking of the hierarchy between figure and ground as fixed, these paintings unblock the passage between the two to take the advantage away from the privileged party. In Chilver’s painting, the victim bites back.
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