by John Chilver
published in translation as Entkörperte Malerei in The Happy Fainting of Painting, edited by Hans-Jurgen Hafner and Gunter Reski, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Koenig, Cologne, 2014, ISBN 978-3-86335-670-5, p62-67, translation by Bert Rebhandl; this text revisits and repositions material from the earlier essay If Display Becomes Materiality
The toughest painting of the last twenty years makes a decisive move away from those identifications with materiality that were characteristic of both late modernism and stylistic post-modernism. This propels painting into uncharted territory. In turning away from the materiality formerly associated with the object-qualities of paintings, there has been a realignment whereby paintings undergo a dematerialisation, while materiality is instead increasingly associated with display. To understand this, we first need to examine the circumstances of modernism in which a particular conjugation of object and image was practised.
Within the unfolding of its modern history, painting acquired the dual status of image and object. The constant task of high modernism – even continuing through to Kippenberger or Lasker in the 1980s – was to inventively correlate image with ‘objectness.’ This was the reign of the painting-as-object. Paintings had always been both images and objects. Yet before modernism the ‘object-ness’ of the painting was only understood negatively as a technical condition, not positively as an affective dimension that could sustain a dialectical relation to an emergent image. Of course the emphasis on object-quality had to do with painting’s territorialisation of its domain at a strategic remove from that of photography. But without denying that logic, I want to approach the painting-as-object from the point of view of display. If the painting-asobject is a central thread across a swathe of trans-modernist painting (traceable through cubism, constructivism, Schwitters, Pollock, Burri, Rauschenberg, Ryman, Stella, Palermo, Knoebel, Polke, Kippenberger, Lasker, Dunham and so forth) then how do we understand the relation it poses between the painting and the space in which it is displayed?
To answer that let’s go further back. What would be a concrete indication of the origin of concern for the materiality or ‘object-ness’ of paintings? Perhaps it began when paintings were first displayed without frames. In her 1938 book on Picasso, Gertrude Stein described the epoch of Picasso’s cubism as one in which “pictures commenced to want to leave their frames.” [1] The removal of the traditional frame – which had served both to protect the painting and to bracket off its virtual space from the architectural space around it – was already implicit in Seurat’s practice of marking off a painted margin of chromatic contrast around his compositions. John Russell described an 1887 study for Les Poseuses:
The vertical bands of colour at the edges gave place at a later stage to the frame, painted by Seurat himself to suit the picture, which so impressed Pissarro when he visited the studio in June 1887….[2]
The bands Russell cites at the vertical edges of this oil study were a rehearsal for a dotted frame that could be attached later. So the point is not whether Seurat actually got rid of the physical frame: frequently he did not. What matters is that he acted out the issue in, e.g., Le Chenal de Gravelines, Grand-Fort-Philippe, 1890. By marking off a visual frame with his coloured dots Seurat dissolved the frame into his own painting vocabulary. He posed the question of how paintings might govern their own framing devices and thereby assert themselves as legislators of their relation to the real space of display.
Robert Ryman’s work stands as the high tide of the painting-as-object. There is little sense after Ryman (meaning after approximately 1975) that the painting-as-object could go further. In the 1980s stylistic postmodern painting produced hybrids of, for instance, drip painting with grandiose assemblage. But this extension of the paintingas- object failed to approach painting’s relation to the space of display in any genuinely analytic spirit. The contrast with Ryman could hardly be stronger. Indeed in Ryman’s work there is nothing less than an explicit co-opting of the technical paraphernalia of painting’s display into the constitution of an image, though it is admittedly the spectral remainder of an iconically famished image. In works such as Untitled Drawing (1976), Express (1984), Leader (1987) and Catalyst III (1985) Ryman incorporated into the manifest structure of the work the fasteners that attached the painted surface to the wall. In Leader the square 101 x 101 cm fibreglass panel is painted white and punctuated by four steel Allen screw fasteners that are placed symmetrically though not entirely regularly. Ryman thus drew attention to the fastenings that held a flat thing against a wall at eye level, but which had never previously been declared as visible elements of a painting.
The thinking behind the fasteners has to do with the way a painting hangs on a wall; usually paintings if they’re pictures, hang invisibly on a wall, because we’re not so interested in that. It’s the image we’re looking at in the confined space… My paintings don’t really exist unless they’re on the wall as part of the wall, as part of the room. [3]
Ryman’s work marks, on the one hand, a continuity with the problematic of Seurat’s dotted margins; one preoccupied with how painting might assert control over its own framing devices. On the other hand it connects with those artists (Palermo, Oiticica, Buren among them) who sought more forthrightly to integrate painting with its architectural container – “as part of the room”. It is fitting then to identify Ryman as the non plus ultra of the painting-as-object: after him it is impossible to go further without abandoning it, or at least without fatally diluting it by embracing the surrounding space and truly becoming “part of the room”.
More mainstream examples of the painting-as-object are the Picasso of the 1912 Still-Life with Chair-Caning or Schwitters, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Johns et cetera. But the advantage of starting via Seurat and Ryman is that the discussion develops in terms of a contest of limits and of framing where the painting attempts both to contain and pictorialize its own limit markers. Ryman takes this to an extreme in incorporating the fastenings that would normally coincide with a boundary where the painting meets the space of its display. Many theoretical texts [4] have reflected upon the question of whether and how in general a finite entity or field might define its own limits without first overstepping them. If, however, the overstepping was necessary before marking the limits then it must have been impossible for the entity to determine its limits from within. The painting-as-object inherited just such a paradoxical jurisdiction when it claimed sovereignty over its boundaries. It presumed to legislate the relation between painting and the architectural space in which it was displayed purely from within the sovereign bounds of painting. That was also the hope of mediating between the virtual space of the image and the physical space of display. The painting-as-object arrogated to itself the immodest task of this mediation. But it was always going to be a precarious undertaking.
If Ryman was the artist who radically materialized the painting-as-object, then it was Donald Judd who most perspicuously understood the tension at its origin. In his text Specific Objects, Judd explained why he disliked illusionism in painting. The problem was that the marks in an illusionistic painting have to be both real marks in real space and signs for a virtual interiority. Hence they lack integrity, are neither one thing nor the other. Judd identified the tension between (material) object and (immaterial) image and preferred to solve the tension by erasing it altogether:
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and literal space, space in and around marks and colours. [5]
Here Judd means that the “space around” marks and colours, which he calls real space, cannot reside as the happy neighbour of “space in” those same marks and colours, meaning illusionistic space. Judd found a way out of the painting-as-object. He proposed instead the object-as-object. Which was alright so long as one was prepared to abandon painting. Judd is the exemplary case of what happens in the void left by the subtraction of painting when its illusionistic interiority is rigorously excised, leaving only a syntax of exteriority.
It is notable that from around 1989 onwards, the painting-as-object is neutralised but not at all in the minimalist manner. Instead, in a few key examples, painting returns in a spirit of sheer pictorial illusion and very often as an unbroken continuous surface. The term disappearance is proposed here in a double sense. It refers firstly to this neutralisation and dissolution of the painting-as-object. Then secondly, to the disappearance of the painter as present and expressive author. In neutralising the painting-as-object, artists of the last twenty years have had to invent technical and intellectual solutions to the dematerialization or disincarnation of painting itself. The foil for that disincarnation has been an increasingly insistent assertion of the materiality of display.
The two exemplary figures in this dialectic of disappearance and display are Ad Reinhardt and Glenn Brown. For the timelines of my account Reinhardt looks awkwardly premature. But painting shifts historically at uneven rates, sometimes glacial, sometimes breakneck and endlessly looping back on itself. Ad Reinhardt was perhaps the first painter to intuit that the most strenuous challenge for painting beyond modernism would be the task of disappearance. But it’s important not to confuse this with the many modernist prophets of the end. The challenge of this new task of disappearance was not and is not simply one of enacting a gesture of finality, be it poetic (Lucio Fontana) or cynical (Yves Klein). Crucially it was never a question of approaching disappearance expressively or through metaphor or symbol. The problem was more fundamentally structural: it was the question of how a pictoriality could be invented at the very scene of disappearance, and more stringently, as an operation conditional upon painting’s dematerialisation. Reinhardt was explicit about eradicating materiality from painting, calling for “The re-dematerialization of pigment matter.” [6] Speaking in a telephone seminar organized by artscanada in 1967, Reinhardt indicated a link between his choice of black and the desire to suppress materiality:
There’s something about darkness or blackness that I don’t want to pin down…. And it has not to do with… the color of matter. [7]
By moving into exclusively black from around 1960, Reinhardt stayed faithful to his avowed ambition to “push painting beyond its thinkable, seeable, feelable, graspable limits.” [8] He was clear about the decisive advantage of black, and especially matte black, for the task of dematerialization. I think it is clear from his paradoxical remarks on space in his meta-ironic 1957 polemic ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ that he was conscious in the late works of knotting together three crucial terms: black, dematerialization and what we might call a virtual-void:
[Rule] 7. No space. Space should be empty, should not project, and should not be flat. “The painting should be behind the picture frame.” [9]
Black is what would allow this paradoxical destination to be approached by dematerializing the painting-as-object: unlike the latter, Reinhardt’s black painting would “not be flat.” Almost infinitely demanding, it would also “not project” and yet still “be behind the picture frame.” The truly aporetic intensity of these multiple and conflictual demands are, I claim, best grasped by the notion of a pictoriality of disappearance.
Understood from this perspective, Ad Reinhardt’s is one of the crucial inventions in modern painting. It is the first to derive pictoriality from disappearance, (as distinct from symbolizing it). Radically liminal, it removes light itself from the painting. In Reinhardt’s black paintings this forces the viewer to greatly prolong their viewing time to allow the eye to readjust until it can recalibrate its perceptual thresholds. In the 1960s Reinhardt was constantly sending black paintings off to exhibitions where viewers would touch them and mark their fragile, ultra-matte surfaces; [10] the paintings would be sent back to the studio where they were then often repainted. [11] What these viewers were reacting to was the extreme difficulty of visually judging where exactly the canvas surface was in space. In a glossy or an encrusted painting, light bounces off the surface [12] and it’s easy to see where the real canvas surface is and so to distinguish real surface from spatial pictorial illusion. With Reinhardt there is only a liminal chromatic illusion that demands sustained durational viewing. The paint surface itself is so matte that almost no light bounces off it and it becomes difficult to decide exactly where the surface is. This explains why the paintings got marked up: viewers needed to find where the surface really was and so had to check by touch.
Reinhardt spent time investigating how to reduce the glossiness of his oil paint. [13] In removing much of the binding linseed oil from his paint he came close to applying sheer pigment to his canvases, resulting in extremely fragile paint films. Such was the technical price to be paid for a liminally chromatic painting that could deny its own literal materiality without needing to take the detour through any conventional illusionism. The first viewing of a black painting presents the beholder with a seemingly homogeneous black square. Given some minutes to re-adjust the eye, the painting then reveals itself as nine component squares, which the viewer can then confidently assign to the individual primary colours. In this way the durational viewing tends to bracket off the experience of blackness as such. Only by returning one’s attention once again to the painting’s surrounding white walls does one re-encounter the paintings as black, homogeneous and internally undivided. In other words, the full effect of these paintings demands and rewards attention to an interiority or virtuality of the paintings that is conditional upon a bracketing off of the real space of the display environment. This insistent interiority set Reinhardt’s work apart from his contemporaries who favoured the object-as-object.
The pictoriality of disappearance was rehearsed by Reinhardt and is a path distinct from either the painting-as-object or the minimalist object-as-object. Disappearance here is intended to denote both (a) the disappearance of the painting-as-object and (b) the disappearance of the expressive artist-author. Both aspects were already evident in both Reinhardt’s practice and his rhetoric of refusals and negations. These two senses of disappearance are evident in a much more strategic way in the work of Glenn Brown, and in particular the works he has done since they early 1990s based on portrait heads by Frank Auerbach.
The Auerbach series began in the early 1990s as largely technical exercises in controlled and flattened reproduction. Brown has described the effect that Sherrie Levine’s work had on him as well as the importance of Arcimboldo’s example. Possibilities were suggested by seeing an Arcimboldo portrait as “a painting of a sculpture of a person made out of fish, if that makes sense.” He compared that to his own painting:
So I was trying to do…a painting of a sculpture of a person made out of paint. So the person became as if made out of brushmarks. [14]
The conception of the work as a painting of a sculpture is crucial. For it places materiality at a remove from the painting and in so doing it fictionalises that materiality. In the Auerbach-derived paintings materiality is depicted in order to be evacuated, to be eradicated. The paintings are dematerialized by their painstaking depiction of materiality. The intense pictorial affect of these paintings is embedded in this paradox whereby appearance is created by disappearance. It is the creation of an appearance by the subtraction of a materiality. But that’s not all. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the end product of Brown’s painting is a condition of pure dematerialization. Rather the paintings operate as the material sites of a subtraction of materiality.
There is here a disappearance of the painting as a self-sufficient thing in the world. The painting almost consumes itself in its relation to the Auerbach work that it quotes. Almost, but not entirely. There is a remainder that allows something new that passes beyond quotation. Since about 2000 there has been an evident mutation. The clumps of tromp l’oeil brushmarks that make up the Auerbach figures have begun to lift away, floating in shadowy recesses, starting to evaporate. Brown now plays much more freely: we are invited to see round the back of the brushmarks, so that they seem to be forming a mask for a figure that has been hollowed out. Like Reinhardt, Brown addresses what has emerged as perhaps the most exacting problematic of contemporary painting: that of deriving pictoriality from the dematerialization of the painting-as-object.
It is a commonplace that one of the massive transitions in late modernist art is associated with an alteration to the status of the exhibition. As Brian O’Doherty wrote in the 1970s about the shifting role of the gallery interior:
The history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first. [15]
There was a crucial mutation whereby the exhibition shifted from being the mode of public distribution of art to being the privileged mode of its production. Although this is widely understood, there is still a dearth of critical thinking about its consequences for painting. The rise of the exhibition is what displaced the painting-as-object. As the exhibition asserted itself increasingly as the dominant mode and site of art’s production (and not merely of its ex post facto distribution), so the credibility of the painting-of-object, which had evolved to mediate between pictoriality and display space, diminished. A central claim of this essay is that the most effective recent painting is characterized by a dual logic whereby (i) painting disincarnates itself and allies its dematerialization to (ii) the activation of the space of display. I now turn to the second strand in this duality.
In the 1990s Michel Majerus forged a reputation as an inventor of energized painting installations. His originality lay in an ability to combine a feeling of ecstatic nonauthenticity with a more analytical reflection on the conditions of possibility of the exhibition itself. In his solo shows like Demand the best, don’t accept excuses at Monika Sprüth, Cologne in 2000, Majerus employed his characteristic tactic of inserting eclectic paintings and reliefs into exorbitant display structures that very explicitly materialized the space of display. They did so by loudly invading and stylizing the space. Demand the best, don’t accept excuses contained three big painting-like things on the walls: one was an affectionate de Kooning pastiche; another an aluminium relief with an interplay of coloured discs overlaid on their negative equivalents; and the third carried the words of the show’s title in a blend of gestural abstraction and pastiche advertising. Elegant yet obtrusive white buttresses ran in parallel across the floor and intersected with a perpendicular buttress thereby dividing the floor into sections. Viewers had to step over them.
With Majerus there was always a feeling that the installation design threatened to overpower the paintings, not just because of its intense allure but also because it tended to look much less arbitrary than the paintings that were inserted into it. This was because there was an evident pragmatic logic to the way the installation designs could be seen to map and interpret their architectural containers. In Majerus’s final show for Neuger Riemschneider, Berlin in 2002, titled Controlling the Moonlight Maze, the paintings, as usual, were fast, witty, eclectic, resolutely anti-humanist; yet it was only in their deliberate dissonances and variety that they seemed to amass any weight of necessity as an ensemble. Taken singly the paintings lacked the intensity and authority of the installation design. Here though it is worth noting the comparative ‘surfacelessness’ of the four ‘paintings’ in Controlling the Moonlight Maze. In other words, here too it makes sense to speak of a comparative dematerialization of the paintings and their surfaces. Moreover, the question of the arbitrariness of the paintings, in contrast to the evident motivation of the display designs, requires qualification. If the substitutability and hyper-eclecticism of the painting’s imagery is understood as an equivalent to web-browsing then its arbitrariness itself becomes significant. This interpretation makes a good deal of sense for Majerus. What’s more, it is significant for this text in that the internet is an infinite repertoire of images that are never spatially unique. Contrasted with the spatial instantiation of display then, the infinite image-bank of the internet appears as a crucial horizon of contemporary dematerialization. Majerus’s project can be understood as an exuberant attempt to think the consequences of this for painting.
Of course there are many paths besides the one associated here with disincarnation of painting plus activation of display. The work of Wade Guyton differs from the disincarnation/activation of display model yet at the same time, shares a lot of common ground with it. It develops what seems to be a kind of dematerialization distinct from the one proposed in this text. Guyton typically marks canvases (as well as found papers and printed matter) using an Epson inkjet printer. With a digital file as starting point, he prints off multiple versions of the same source data. The resulting printed canvases have inert, ultra-flat and minimally inflected surface and tonal variations, making each one unique in some respect. Small differences in how the silkscreen ink registered on canvas created local singularities in Warhol’s serial imagery. Similarly Guyton operates at the technical limits of his printer such that his chosen formulaic marks or forms (such as an “X” or black rectangles) may break up, show glitches or fail fully to register on the canvas thereby creating details of local uniqueness. Guyton’s black paintings (exhibited in 2007-8 in New York, Paris and Frankfurt) are exercises in scrutinizing local discrepancies between individual copies of the same source.
These paintings do indeed enact a certain dematerialization in terms of a dialectics of digital origin and printed iteration. But the individual canvases are no less material than a Pollock drip painting. Obviously the removal of the human body as generator of marks, and its replacement by the printer is a major declaration. But it is not ultimately a dematerializing declaration. It may be a diluted materiality, even a ‘zero degree’ materiality, but it is still irreducibly material. Indeed the effect of the work remains dependent on both an aesthetics of concretized, material surface deriving from late modernism, monochrome painting and so forth; and a materializing logic, in which it is (almost like a crude illustration of the Deleuzian duality of actual and virtual) the iterative materialization that produces actual uniquenesses on canvas.
Big critical claims are made by commentators concerning the distribution of Guyton’s work between the computer’s digital source file and the inkjet printer’s iteration of the file information. In John Kelsey’s words: “The first thing the work abandons is the act of painting and with it its manual space…. Now the space of the work is no longer optical or manual but communicational, extending along a network that links one apparatus to another. The object in the gallery is now like a hard copy… and what we are seeing is perhaps less a painting than a rendering.” [16] This is accurate enough up to a point. But it overlooks how deeply beholden to the styles and devices of late modernist formalism Guyton’s work remains. Its market and institutional successes are surely very much consequences of how the work inflects a spectral version of familiar formalism with elements of contextual critique and ties that to a discourse of technical reproducibility. Which is not nothing. But there remains something complacent in Guyton’s position: the sense of a critique that knows its moves too well and locates the discursive habits of its audiences all too readily.
Thus far much of Guyton’s most engaging work relies on a collision of late formalist style and digital reproduction. It’s the colliding that feels fresh. But, by the same token, it is the duality of colliding terms that what allows the stylistic devices to be taken for granted and treated as received forms in Guyton’s work. No doubt there can be plenty of critical alibis for that. But whatever they be, the work, for all its manifest strategic intelligence, is devoid of pictorial invention. How one responds to Guyton depends on what exactly one thinks the work is: individual canvases, or entire work groups linked by an electronic umbilicus to their digital source files? The critical claims for the work must presume it to be the latter, in which case the individual work are understood as place-holders of sorts. Kelsey is right to emphasize the work’s abolition of “manual space” insofar as it is supplanted by machinic space. But whereas Reinhardt, Brown and Majerus dematerialize the tactility of painting, or (as in Brown) remove it to the far side of the painting’s proscenium arch, Guyton converts it from manual to machinic; which is to reassign it, but not to dematerialize it.
In setting up the crazy-sounding triad of Reinhardt, Brown and Majerus, I’ve tried to sketch what painting might be and how it might proceed when it dissolves the painting-as-object in a movement towards disincarnation. Following the contours of these examples in all their awkward and disobliging actuality, we find no happy resolutions and no tidy textbook case studies. The overarching diagnosis of a disincarnation of painting aligned with a materialization of the space of display remains valid, I claim, despite the actual paucity of instances where artists really do cash out all the terms of my account all at once. The three names of the triad are each consistent with a disincarnation of painting and a corresponding transfer of the burden of materiality away from painting and instead onto the space of display. In Glenn Brown’s case this transfer of materiality is made more or less literal when he 8 displays encrusted sculptural blobs alongside the continuous surfaces of his superflat paintings.
Through the critical affirmation of Brown and Reinhardt and delineation of a commonality of purpose in their very different painterly projects, I have tried to situate a contemporary horizon for painting that is distinct both from modernism and from stylistic post-modernism. The task that I describe as one of extracting pictoriality from disappearance is, I claim, both unprecedented and ontologically ambitious. Yet the coincidence of the dematerialization of painting with the materialization of display is no happy partnership. It is fraught, conflicted, irresolvable. Pictures have to be displayed if only to become public things available to public conversations. But as pictorial occurrences they are ontologically distinct and disengaged from the space of display as such. Or almost so. Again an emphasis has to placed on ‘almost’ because the dematerializing operation described as exemplary in Brown and Reinhardt is not quite total: it is conditional upon the assertion of paintings as material sites for the subtraction of materiality. This too is something unprecedented in the work of painting today.
NOTES
1 Gertrude Stein Picasso. New York: Dover Publications, 1984, p.12.
2 John Russell Seurat. London: Thames and Hudson, 1965, p.206.
3 Ryman in Robert Storr (ed.) Robert Ryman. London: Tate and New York: MoMA, 1993, p.156. Emphasis added.
4 Such questions arise in the problematic of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and recur in the later Philosopical Investigations; in a different philosophical moment and register they are foregrounded in Derrida’s Limited Inc. and The Truth in Painting.
5 Donald Judd Specific Objects reprinted in James Meyer (ed.) Minimalism: Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 2000, p.209.
6 Among his 'Art Planks: Programs for “Program” Painting (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part VII)', which first appeared in Art Voices in 1963 and was read out at the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ in London in 1966, Reinhardt lists “The re-dematerializarion of pigment matter.” Reinhardt Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, p. 69. “ ‘Dematerialization’ was a phrase that Reinhardt had used while speculating on the nature of his late paintings.” Michael Corris Ad Reinhardt. London: Reaktion Books, 2008, p. 136.
7 Reinhardt 'Black as Symbol and Concept', in Reinhardt Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991p. 87. Final emphasis added.
8 Reinhardt: unpublished, undated notes. Ibid, p. 104.
9 Reinhardt Twelve Rules for a New Academy (1957). Ibid, p. 206.
10 “1963: Six paintings in New York and six paintings in Paris get marked up and have to be roped off from the public. 1964: Ten paintings in London get marked up.” Reinhardt Chronology. Ibid., p. 8. See also Yve-Alain Bois The Limit of Almost in Ad Reinhardt (Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). New York: Rizzoli 1991, p. 12: “…Reinhardt was at last invited to send some of his recent work to one of the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘selection’ shows (‘Americans 1963’)…. Once again however Reinhardt was right to feel ill-presented…. The canvases were badly installed (much too brightly lit, roped off, and hung too high so that people would keep their hands off them.)” Final emphasis added.
11 “By 1967 Reinhardt had come to discover the limit of the darkening of the ‘black’ painting; effects that were especially vivid and clearly controlled in works dating from 1964 gave way to canvases so dark as to appear to be uninflected monochromes. It is likely that Reinhardt leaned this gradually through the experience of restoring, by literally repainting, previously damaged work. Coupled with Reinhardt’s desire to discover how dark a ‘black’ painting could be before it ‘failed,’ the process of restoration resulted paradoxically in the darkest works of the series of paintings initiated in 1960.” Michael Corris Ad Reinhardt. London: Reaktion Books, 2008, p.147. And also Lippard: “The greatest barrier to chronological accuracy [in dating works] is the fragility of the later paintings, which resulted in damage virtually every time they were exhibited. Back in the studio they were repainted according to the original scheme with the same colors and tones, which were saved and labelled for such emergencies.” Lucy R. Lippard Ad Reinhardt. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981, p 114.
12 Reinhardt often voiced his principled disdain for glossy or reflective paint surfaces. For example: “There should be no shine in the finish. Gloss reflects and relates to the changing surroundings.” From Twelve Rules For A New Academy. Reinhardt, op. cit., p.207. Or again: “…the glossier, texturier, gummy black is a sort of an objectionable quality in painting. It’s one reason I moved to… [what is] a matte black…. If you have a look at a shiny black surface it looks like a mirror. It reflects all the activity that’s going on in a room. As a matter of fact, it’s not detached then.” From Black as Symbol and Concept in Reinhardt, op. cit., p. 87.
13 “The effect… that was soon to invade even the red paintings, resulting in the earliest ‘black’ (red, green, and blue) ones, was due to the oil being drained from the paints. The slightly grayed, matte surface also further deemphasized disparities of hue, enabling Reinhardt to bring ochre, for instance, into a ‘black’ range. The motive for such destruction of standard paint surfaces (making his work increasingly susceptible to damage from any oily substance, especially fingerprints) was a concern with light that finally overwhelmed concern with color as it is generally understood.” Emphasis added. Lucy R. Lippard Ad Reinhardt. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981, p. 97-102.
14 Glenn Brown, conversation with John Chilver 28/5/2008.
15 Brian O’Doherty Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 14.
16 John Kelsey '100%' in Wade Guyton Black Paintings. Zurich: JP Ringier, 2010. (No page numbers.)
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