Post 31: The negation of a painting

Peaceful photo of an almond that looks like a piece of wood.

I’d quickly say that what I want to create is the negation of a painting, but would much more slowly (so slow as to effectively round down to never) reach an articulation of the status of or qualifications to the constitution of such a thing. More than that, I’d say working toward a negation is centrally about proceeding in a certain direction (not a forward one) than about trying to create a negative substance in the end. 

The problem (that I face in confronting the idea of making a painting) is that “forward” is supposedly a known direction. Maybe not even supposedly. It just is. And when I think of a painting (something properly and recognizably known as one [which I guess is what is taken for granted when you refer to any term]), I imagine it existing out in front of me (“in front of” implying forward).* Which is not to say that making a painting is a straight-line pursuit, but just that I can’t help but think of a painting as a something at a somewhere that a type of forward movement would approach. And if you are moving forward (this is all conceptually, not literally), or know you need to, you have to find a way of doing that. And so this problem of figuring out how to move in a direction you are familiar with seems to be a positive (opposite to an absence) act of doing something. There’s a sense of an outline to this whole thing, and it’s an outline I don’t know how to deal with. Whereas, the acts I’m more attuned to pursuing in making are movements of maneuvering around something--of changing it, or sidestepping it, or getting out of it entirely. All acts that can be thought of as absences. (Why this is the case is likely the principal question.) 

Thinking of a painting makes me think of a relationship that I can see. Maybe it’s that I can point out the forward relationships among things generally (a chair in front of a lamp, one sidewalk square in front of another), and it’s a recognition that comes too soon for me in the process of painting. The known quality--known even only in this way that I “know” what a painting is (just this ability to acknowledge that it’s something that exists, being able to differentiate it from other known things [not a very strong sense of knowing])--makes it hard to not see it out in front of me. And again, the path of making that hypothetical painting is still surely littered with hot coals and detours and what not, but there’s something about the subject at hand existing there out on the horizon line, or, knowing if will be there on the horizon line once it’s made, that is too known for me. (What is this kind of knowing that deters me? A kind of trusting?) Or, just the wrong kind of knowing for me to have. The thought of it makes me want to block out its image, which sounds exactly like where the negation of a painting begins. (Or, the negation of considering something to be a painting?) 

Before getting to that, I want to say that I’m wondering if this whole “forward” business to imagining painting comes from the dynamic of always seeing what are strictly and properly paintings somewhere in front of me (gallery/museum/home wall, usually at a few feet of distance). And then having this perception settle itself onto the process of making. Is it to say that the end of a painting is coming into my imagining of the beginning of it? What makes that happen?

I’m feeling sure that I’ve been conflating the creation of a painting-negation with the act of negation. Though they may turn out to be the same thing. It seems likely that pursuing negation becomes about a direction(al approach) because a possible negative substance of a painting doesn’t exist. (What would a solidly existing negative painting be?) In this way, it rightfully sets up a false pursuit; pursuing negation (in having no end object) grants one the ability to pursue the nothingness that is creating writ large. Yet, there are still things I see as the embodiment of these negatives--perhaps they are the pointers along this path…

(In writing all that has come before, I have the image that what I’m writing is a crumbled up ball of newspaper, but rather than the continuation of writing being an unfolding of this piece of paper, it instead is just a pinpointing of what is able to be read from the various, small facets of paper within the ball structure. Which is to say that this business of what I’m writing about is all small surfaces? That what exists here exists in pieces and those are what I acknowledge and look at?)

What I view as painting-negations are 1) not paintings (crucial)--or maybe I’ll call them not “actual” paintings (more on this some other time) and 2) not only “nots” in terms of the painting spectrum, but seem to have something else to what they’re not more generally. Maybe this is a strong sense of opposition, reluctance, denial that gets spoken through their lack of value, accidental formation, apathy.

One of my favorites of these currently is a cup on top of a trash can--a particularly present sight in Philly right now, though soon to become (just) little memorials of the city workers’ strike, so let's hope they last as long as possible. This structure is one of the many sets of items I see out in the world that contain a change: where one thing (a color, form, line, object, etc.) has been put in a dynamic with another color, form, line, object, etc. In contrast with the ingrained sense of “forwardness” to how I can relate to a painting, these in-the-world assemblages are eternally behind, to the side of, and at all kinds of highs and lows to me. I don’t sense any prominent directional relationship. To think of this cup-trash can as a painting-negation is not to think of it not-yet-becoming a painting--as though prohibited from taking on that title--but, I feel, to give it permission to be a painting, but to then wade through this possibility until reaching the territory of negation. What does it mean to term this form as not a painting in a manner that still retains its tension with the word and category of painting? More, how can that be done, i.e., I don’t say it’s not a painting to say it is a garbage can, but to say that I passed it through the domain of painting and decided I will not deem it one. The “passed through” feels important. Almost as though everything starts out at the status of painting and moves on from there.

In coming back to what I initially set out to say--something of needing to think of making as less a building something up and more a destabilizing of something existing--I find the question of: What is it to work away from something, rather than toward something? What are other avenues of moving toward or away that relate to known and unknownness? 

I also want to share that as I was writing what may have been a few sentences of this, I watched an ant scurry along the edge of a row of sidewalk bricks, and as it reached a brick that a fly was positioned on, the fly moved out of the way, and the ant continued on its straight path. It wasn’t a completely necessary relocation on the part of the fly--exactly like when someone walking toward you moves to the side to allow you to pass, though you both could have fit comfortably as you were.

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* I would be deeply excited to know how any painters out there think of this--if they (you) think in relation to this orientation concept at all, and how they (you) feel situated with it if so. Do not-yet-made, not-yet-existing paintings exist in a certain direction and distance from you?