Christopher Campbell, Artist's Statement, 1997.06.10

The most critical questions that I ask myself are the simplest: What possibilities are left for painting (especially abstract painting) today? What claims can painting still make as a representation of one’s experience in the world? Why paint at all? Sometimes it is tempting to conclude that new media, video, and installations are able to encompass appetites and drives that painting cannot; it is tempting—if a bit too facile—to collapse the project of painting with its most egregious symptoms (the circuit of its capital, the intellectual bankruptcy of many of its practitioners and handlers, the politics of its display and consumption). I, however, do not consign painting to an exhausted past, for I find, on enough afternoons in Soho or Chelsea, in the Metropolitan or the MOMA, among the old books at the Detroit Institute of Arts or the new ones at Hacker, enough moments of perspective in which it seems that art (including painting) is not only not losing force, but gathering it in every sense; gathering force to reintegrate the forgotten, to radically reshape the familiar, and to propose the wholly new. T. J. Clark has recently proposed a definition of the “lyric” which has become a central point of reference in my understanding of the development of modernist painting.

At its best, in say the 1992 exhibition “Joan Mitchell: Pastel” at the Whitney Museum, the lyric mode offers the sense of an individual voice finding form in remembered feeling, the memories of places and persons transfigured through a personalized kinesthetics of gestural abstraction. As someone who spent a formative period of time painting with her in Vétheuil, I am aware of just how susceptible I have been in the past to the siren song of this model. As Clark notes, however, one of the most important drives of the modernist project in the 20th century has been toward the repression of the lyric: indeed this is powerfully operative in contemporary art today. What has, at some points, appeared to be a plausible escape from the totalization of the personal (absolute geometric rigor, strategies of chance, seriality or the indexical), invariably appears in sufficiently historical perspective as indissolubly part of what it has attempted to suppress. In this sense, I understand much of my work of the last five years as both fascinated with the seductive beauty of a projection of idiosyncratic wholeness, and striving to find its form ever more strongly in the critique of any such formulation.

Growing up on a wild part of the shore of Lake Ontario with a father who taught painting at SUNY Oswego, it has always been literally second “nature” to go out to draw. Now, however, in wanting to find a “pre-lyric” source in the raw heterogeneity of nature, I have begun to make highly abstract color photographs out in the field using a long lens and a short depth of field. Often made in environmentally extreme conditions of early/late, dim/intense, flat/storm light, these composite prints yield to sustained inspection an extraordinary richness of unpredictability: complex structural configurations, fractal organic patterns, surprising chords of disjunctive color. Initially collected as an expedient harvesting of raw sensation, they have in the last few years become interesting in their own right, especially as I have come to understand aspects of their relation to the new interdisciplinary principles of complex systems. Here, “complexity” usually describes those systems in which a myriad of apparently simple units exhibit surprising and complex behaviors at the next hierarchical level. Neural networks and biological communities are good examples, but so are the unit marks of Cézanne, in which individual strokes coded essentially for color, value and orientation form a relational system that organizes to connote an entire universe of perception’s ambiguity and feeling’s inexhaustibility.

In an attempt to work out from the strange veracity of these photographs, last fall I began an experimental series of works on paper (22 x 30 inches) in which I attempted to incorporate qualities of the visual softness and indeterminacy of the photographs into their painted equivalents by building up micro-thin layers of pigment suspended in thin films of a viscous medium. In the process, this work has turned into something like a dialogue with some of Gerhard Richter’s recent paintings. However, unlike Richter’s bifurcation of his work into photorealist and “abstract” paintings, I find that at a local level I am interested in translating and preserving the smallest details of my photographic sources, but in such a manner that as a whole nothing of the origin remains overtly recoverable. In a single work, I frequently use multiple photographic sources, overlaying structure upon structure, regularly changing the orientation of both source and canvas, tuning my perception of the photographs to constantly changing scales such that the paintings end up looking more like diagrammed flows of energy within organic systems than anything like the banalities of wind-blown grasses or ice formation on a river. 

Certainly the standard account of advanced painting from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century has long privileged questions of the visual, of looking. Rosalind Krauss’s analysis in The Optical Unconscious and Michael Fried’s account of Pollock in “Three American Painters” are still centered on an idea of opticality. Rather paradoxically, however, in relation to their sources and methods, I do not see the work I am doing now as being primarily about the visual or the optical. Instead, the configurations I am encountering (encouraging?) in the studio seem very nearly to be like the projection of a kind of somatic awareness, a bodily experience mapped onto materiality: a registration of the mechanism of sensing pressed into intimate contact with the world. There is not, of course, and never has been, any such thing as purely optical experience, for our attention to the visible is always mediated by the simultaneous competition from all our other awarenesses. What then is the nature of being sentient, conscious and aware? What would it look like to show how consciousness registers the instantaneous contingency of things inside/outside? This is an important part of the dialogue in which I find myself at this moment, and which I hope the work incites and suggests.

In parallel with these smaller works on paper, I have recently begun a series of large works on polyester sailcloth (each 5 x 7 feet), a material I first utilized as a painting support for a commission last spring to produce a backdrop for a modern dance based on the first of J. S. Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites. In the process of working with this material on a very large scale (18 x 24 feet), I became aware of the possibility of displaying paintings without either a conventional opaque ground or a rigid backing structure. These new paintings are intended to be suspended in such a manner that the inherent translucency of the fabric allows the painting to function literally as a colored membrane in space. In this sense it seems to be the ideal support for registering the multi-sensorial physiology of the act of painting as I currently practice it: feeling the harmonic flow of music playing in the studio, registering the pulse of desire, dancing the drawing and color into life. Ironically, one of the most remarkable aspects of becoming an artist has been the recognition that all these originary conditions necessarily slip away at the moment of making. Intentions are no sooner formed than abandoned, sources are no sooner consulted than rendered unrecognizable, form is no sooner established than destroyed. Painting imagined in moments of rhapsody as a form of philosophical inquiry is found to be inevitably subverted at every point and level by practice and materiality. But of course there is also power in such subversion, for the brink between the predictability of habit and the potential chaos of the informe marks out that space where grace may arise, as deliverance from the limitations of the self, as the slow and incremental evolution of the new.

[1] T. J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism, October 69, Summer 1994, p. 48.

 

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