Accordion Folds

Harold Grieves:  John Kelsey has pointed out, that the question today 'is not what to paint' but rather, the more intervening logic of 'how to paint'.  Staked out as an investment that no longer poses a 'problem', this question asks to consider the way painting might retain or  remain as a repository of  ‘the lived question of tactics and techniques'.1 To get the ball rolling I decided to ask Perkins how he might consider paintings’ tactical occupation. This is what he had to say:

Oliver Perkins: I am a painter and these are paintings. I see potential in painting as an occupation and activity and while any position is strategic to a point, I feel better equipped working within its vernacular. I think today, it would be wrong to treat one artistic medium with more scepticism than any other. Painting’s language questions and tempers my thinking, constantly demanding a position that then requires an output. Painting is physical, it remains the architecture of sentiment and its spaces still hold opportunity for restoration. I enjoy paintings’ commonality; it is approachable, comfortable, humorous, and pompous. I guess these embedded attitudes are a shared stage, a constant conversation with real examples (history).

Grieves: Given then this active occupation, this concern for both the physicality of painting and its shared reception, both across history and through the dialectical arrangement of viewer, subject and author, I asked Perkins to speak a little more specifically on his recent work, and how that might arrange or construe a meeting point in which these attitudes not only confer but also make themselves transparent. As he points out, such opticalities rely entirely on an intercession that is conceived long before the actual paintings themselves are created:

Perkins: The parts of the paintings knit together in an idiosyncratic chronology. The materials display their agency, I look to move through it, inflate or deflate, tuning the dumb instrument. The line highlights the frame\plane relationship but also composes an image of reduced composition. This action of hand-drawn verticality is repeated on the various doubled stretchers, drawing attention to their complaisant objectivity. The psychology of the image makes me aware of figure-based painting, not just the figure ground dialectic but also the tension that exists when illusionistic space is offered on the face of a real projected form. The actual object; a rectangular, doubled stretcher is repeated because of its symbolic value as a traditional painting format. Unlike the more geometric “implants” that illustrate a shared externality and figurative mode, the rectangle is a more specific “type” for painting. It is the line’s limited manoeuvres, which promotes its “character”. Its ambition to speak with greater scope is diffused by its own clearly delineated skeleton. This highlights the material contradiction that I employ: a clearly figurative tool, the ink marker, with its comic rhetoric and the formal “implanted” stretcher. The line exposes me as the all too human, expressive and fallible maker. Closer to writing and drawing but hinting at gesture it embodies an uncomfortable space that receives information as quickly as it denies it.

I am trying to achieve a reduced dialectic that highlights the relationship of painting’s sensibility and “everyday” experiences, in all its ordinariness. They could be informed meditations offering just enough aesthetic experience or drawings of space emphasising their situation, like Greenburg calling Mondrian’s paintings “islands” in space but any relationship with the space is merely a flirtation and an inherited facility of a line! Intervention to the physical object of painting is for me a way of finding space. It’s not new, it’s just moved.

Grieves: Hal Foster has pointed out that Modernism's internal threads are much more interesting than the convenient disavowals that postmodern deconstructive perspectives have enshrined.2 As he points out, often such belated attempts to wrestle with the aggression of Modernism have failed to note the internal or immanent thread at work within it. Unravelling this through Surrealism, Foster has suggested that ‘these critiques have become confused with contempt’ and as such, obscure the ‘general lesson… that rather than foreclose Modernism in a restrictive definition, it is more productive to open it up to its contradictions, indeed to its critiques of its own principles’.3 Likewise, Briony Fer has noted that the reductive reading that isolates Malevich and Mondrian as inseminators of a precise geometric order often overlook 'the arbitrary or random character' of their work.4 This is a quality she suggests is particularly obvious in Malevich's work where the drawn line often remains within his Suprematist paintings, both as a trace of action and as an anteriority that suggests a multitude of diversionary possibilities. It's with this in mind that I thought a good starting point would be this recent provocation by Michael Wilson: "the inevitable erosion of utopian modernism’s high ideals by the vagaries of everyday is over familiar to the point of nostalgia. Wasn’t this the theme du jour a decade ago? Or has it achieved a kind of evergreen stratus, become a standard tune to break into when all else fails".5

Patrick Lundberg: In light of these comments and observations I'm interested in talking about Abstraction as a vehicle for totalities or thinking about totalities. A convenience for thinking in these terms if you like. So if we look at early 20th C. Abstraction we think transcendent idealism etc, but what really gets me interested is when we get to the later part of the century and look at the various and multitudinous critiques in and through the medium. Of course what I find though is not a real multiplying of the terms of Abstraction but rather I find the field once again trading in another totality. One set in dialectical opposition to the first but as much of a totality in the sense that the way it is utilized or thought is in terms of a generalization. That of course is this notion of the everyday, a quotidian aesthetic or “The” vernacular. Once again we find the discourse around Abstraction speaking assumptively. Thinking in terms of “The” vernacular when actually all that exists are vernaculars. What I like about Fer's comments on Malevich is that they point to the painting as an already multitudinous field, vital, and pregnant not with its own subversion but in fact an intelligence about the world it is already a part of (the way some of the lessons of revisionist Abstraction are found to be already present). Taking part already in the collision and violence of life as Bataille would have it. Perhaps this is where I become interested in the possibilities of your paintings Oli. In that they don't stage hopeless dialectical tensions but rather allow themselves to breathe, to be porous and to be multiple. It seems to me a real reclamation of some of the original possibilities of this field of painting.

Perkins: Essentially what I am trying to achieve with this body of paintings is to create a series of objects that offer mimetic examples of language/object relationships. A response to the architectural space that surrounds them and the functionality of objects we encounter regularly. Abstraction as a totality seems to rely on factors that are concrete and I don’t see them as overly academic paintings, there is however a deducible set of circumstances available and it’s a procession to an inevitable conclusion, but when I think the numbers up, the work’s accordion nature opens side doors to linguistic play. So as Patrick says, 'they don't stage hopeless dialectical tensions but rather allow themselves to breathe, to be porous and to be multiple'. I would agree I am trying to create a system that doesn’t require definitive solutions but offers scope for continuation. The paintings extend the fundamental tracings of their objectivity to areas less assured.

Grieves: The idea that the everyday, as Patrick points out has become another totalising form is possibly what underlies Wilson's lament. It seemed really apt, and pertinent to this discussion, because I think it is something that I'd prefer to avoid, but I also feel that we'll inevitably have to trace a way around it. Take for instance my recent gambit around Kate Newby's work in which by attending to the quotidian, everyday experience of life she develops a patina or an aesthetic that could be said to work off the modernist aspirations of Le Corbusier.6 What I think you see in Newby's work, especially where the arbitrary mark, what I guess could be called a sort of torn and frayed aesthetic is a similarity that you all share around this idea of the “drawn” line. This seems especially so, when we think about the idea of vagrancy or digression in contrast to the sterility of the taped line, that marked-out aesthetic I think we're all too familiar with. Well it might be worth thinking about such strategies against say Mondrian's use of tape as a guide.... I guess that'd be something you'd be interested in Patrick? We have talked before about Duchamp's use of string as a sort of metre and how that relates to your use of the trace in your wall drawings.

Perkins: I guess in the grand order of Modernism, nuances such as the under-drawing does get overlooked. This ‘arbitrary or random character’, is arguably the artist making the fastest path to the prize, efficiency over aesthetic? When I saw a group of his paintings in Amsterdam, from the ‘Women with Fish’ to a Suprematist white painting I got an urgency from the work, that he was rapidly constructing a painted barricade that the “future” would have to overcome. I did notice the pencil and the general poor state of the works; they really look like artefacts, nostalgic and heavy. About my line, I tried many different methods of producing a line; spray, scratch, transfer, brush and tape. Definitely with tape I found it to formulaic and austere, to planned. I plan the forms, often drawn with string, but not the divisions. These are “spontaneous” acts. The internal divisions are measured by eye and body, thumb to little finger, elbow to wrist for example. The ink line disrupts the minimal, restrained and finished order of the object. The line has an encoded attitude, from comic to doodles, where as a taped line is reflective not only to the object of its position but the order of an external formality. It is not liberated gesture or anything so hedonistic. It is an anxious but methodical attempt to animate each form.


Grieves: Hi Patrick. I'm a bit unsure what you might mean by totalities. Here I think it might be worth thinking about some of the hermetic seals that are performed around a version of hybridity that fails to account for the fact that partners (if they are that) may not be fully formed themselves. In such cases, there has been a trend to think through these "specificities" in terms laid out by Deleuze and Guattari. As they write: 'in truth it is not enough to say, "Long Live The Multiple" difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical, lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available, always n minus one'.7 I labour this point because I think it shows something else up. My point in bringing up Kate Newby, and perhaps I wasn't explicit enough, is that in working out an aesthetic employed by the tactics of the everyday, especially around a provisional mobility alert to relational modes of inhabitation that doesn't create “the” vernacular as a totality, or as a form recognisable as such. That I think was the point I was trying to reach and it is precisely because I think her provisionality and alertness to the way inhabitations, in this instance her attention to traces or affects come out as aestheticised treatments. This I think makes her work more useful to think through, than say Simon Morris, who's work is so invested with this labour/time duality that we could, cutting corners, perhaps just call it a 'proletariat' reworking of Max Gimblett's bourgeois indulgence of a spirituality nexus in which the ideation of a zen clarity is expurgated as mark.8 What I'm trying to get at then is that if we are to think about the way in which an aesthetic might be announced, then I think I want to pay particular attention to its specificity as a contingent material outcome that never wished to be a hermetically sealed totality once and for all. That, at least to me, seems to be what Ollie's paintings want to encode. That is they seem to flesh out a practice that wants to articulate, in that sense of the word as a hooking up, of a coupling, that seeks to prolong a kind of painting, that as we see with the Malevich example has always been around finding those multiplitcious vernaculars you speak of.

Lundberg: Good questions, to the first I would like to say that any practice might have two sides or faces. Not in the sense of the kind of dualism I've described but rather a kind of movement in two directions. One movement in the service of totalization (when I refer to the totality I use it in Manuel De Landa's sense,9 the conceptualization of a large scale entity through generalization) and the other tending toward dissolution of a totality. I guess I see Kate's practice in this light specifically because her repetition of certain motifs and materials can lead to a kind of generalization, at times, of the “common-place” (albeit as located within a certain cultural milieu, that of suburban New Zealand. That being maybe just one possible totality also...). Perhaps this is best described as a potential-toward-totalization as art practice best situates itself right in the middle of these directional tendencies? To pull it back to contemporary Abstraction I see this at play in the practice of Mary Heilmann. The commentary on her work is often little more than a generalization on pop, turning it into a kind of bouncy soft-core multi coloured affect. For instances this description from her bio for the 2008 Whitney biennial: ...“casual” is one of the most common words describing Heilmann’s paintings, which so gracefully traverse craft traditions, popular culture, and the fine arts. Owing in part to her works’ messy assurance, by turns glib and erudite, Heilmann also confounds irony and sincerity. With their visceral convolutions of color, runny streaks of paint, and riotous compositions, her recent paintings wear their pleasures on their sleeves. Perhaps this is the effect of what I like to think of as Abstractions atomizing field, where specificities can be introduced but risk neutralization through a kind of breaking down of an elements' parts, it's all usually dirt and liquid, and being made co-extensive with paint. I guess what I'm trying to say is that within this field things risk becoming kinda Platonic. Something well illustrated to my mind in John Reynold's untitled 2010 exhibition at Sue Crockford Gallery.10 Here the introduction of streaks of actual rain to the surface of the painting become at worst a stand in for a generalized outside to the painting's hermetic interior. A token gesture towards paintings' entangled status with the world.

Grieves: Hey guys, I'd really be interested in hearing more about your ideas of what it might mean for a painting or an act of painting to be porous. I'm guessing this is different to the way Abstract Expression is often described as an emergent whole, a field in which lucidity, or tactility, even figuration comes “out of the web”, as though it’s a trough of latices and skeins in which the most ambiguous of images lurk. You hear this too in anecdotes between Picasso and Brague around the formulation of Cubism in which they'd each challenge the other around uncanny or unintended images emerging from their paintings, 'what is that sheep doing in there'.... I see this as a kind of opticality in a sense of the image breathing or a becoming porous, but it's also susceptible to Robert Irwin's complaint that such strategies are too Rorschach-able....11

Perkins:  “He has a far greater porosity than the others” - Joseph Beuys talking about Blinky Palermo.... I think most obviously this ‘porosity’ alludes to a wide and inclusive range of sources that an artist is open to. It could also intimate the susceptibility of the work to be read from many discursive positions. This ties in quite well to the comments on Malevich, because the Germans, particularly Knoebel and Palermo’s reading of Malevich texts provided them with a social vernacular unbeholden to Blooms’ “anxiety of influence”. Which brings to mind Rauschenberg’s 40-year cycle: that after 40 years it’s available to take, use or borrow. Now possibly it works for him but I agree with the Irwin quote, "to Rorschach-able"; things can become reflexive, an influence can become an idea which, with shape, fits the vernacular. I enjoy fluidity, when it is responsive to a self subscribed language. Hell give me ridiculous, if ridiculous is your own, and isn't stupid. Things rest easy on quotidian leisure. My thinking is that a revisionist practice is only going one way, back, now progress or invention is uneasy also but I only arrive at work when I can see its place in my thinking or history otherwise I don't trust it. "follow your nose'', exactly...

Grieves: actually what i think now is that what i was trying to describe is more like an image being susceptible to a dimensionality in which a figurative composite could emerge. in that sense the painting could be described as porous, porous perhaps in the sense that it absorbs a figurative imagination, hence Irwin's complaint, but i gather you both might mean porous in a different sense, in an ability to absorb one's environment, to offer a reflective point in which the capacities or dialogue of the "room" (the viewing point, the viewing subject) might be said to be enlarged by this mediation...

Lundberg: I might just affirm your instincts and just add that I don't think Abstraction needs to be made porous. That is how the totalizations and generalizations occur, in the forcing of “content”. All we have to do is be alert to the multiple nature of all that we do and follow our nose's consequently. This is not to affirm that anything we do is good enough but rather that the nuances are already there to be extrapolated on.

Grieves: Hey Patrick. I wanted to bring up earlier this notion of Tiqqun's around polarizisation to do with a way in which one might think about how to embrace or engage a field composed in the fluid, and non a-prior sense... but I think here, in view of your comments on Reynolds around a platonic affect it seems more apt. For Tiqqun a polarisation, is a leaning to, a process of shaping what they call a 'form-of-life', that is it's a saturation or embodied and contingent experience that, when polarised becomes like the charged particle, affected.12 Here I think its worth contrasting this process as being distinct from what's been called the epidermalised corporeality of postmodern experience,13 in which the saturation of affiliative processes reduces life to an assemblage of commodified images - such process could be said to reflect a general trend towards self-immolation, whether it's the despair of Paul Virilio's dromoscophy or Marc Auge's non-places.14 Here though I want to stress something else. That is, through this leaning too, this polarisation of affect, what one witnesses, and you seen this in Bernadette Corporation's novel, Renna Spaulings in the moment when the city suddenly resembles different spreads from fashion magazines, and Renna herself, becomes a charged entity by learning to lean into her desired life-form.15 What this moment shows is a kind of embrace of the conditionality, or the specificity of the throes of life, less, now defined by its epidermalised treatment but through and upon such ordinary thread-bare grounds. In this sense the polarization is really describing the process of a learning-how, a relational script that Sarah Whatmore and Steve Hinchliffe have adapted from Haraway's notion of a becoming-with, in which one learns to be affected.16 My point then, and my question here is that perhaps we could think through this trend towards abstraction and its atomizing conditions as a similar sort of processes. Indeed I think it makes sense to bring back up Simon Morris, who just as your example with Reynold's also risks bringing in the external world as an inconsequential and perhaps even false-consciousness sort of dialectical arrangement. However, instead of the material affects of the weather onto the surface acting as an inscription of an arbitrary writing, (an insertion of a textuality I don't even really think works with the practice of Olly and Suzie) what you get in Morris is this inscription (and really here it's a weighting) of Time that's used as a quasi-authorial script. So I wonder, and my question to you is how you might be prepared to read Perkin's paintings in light of this, and perhaps how your initial reaction to them, which referring to Jonathan Lasker, you suggested he'd found a way to prolong the act of painting indefinitely...  

Lundberg: Hey, I like what you're saying but before I properly formulate an answer could I ask you to extrapolate a little on how you see this polarisation or leaning to in relation to my points on Abstraction’s atomizing function? This is the point I'm particularly interested in, for what you are proposing suggests that an atomization (in and of itself) can be seen to have two quite different possible outcomes. Either the possibility for the kind of neutralization I described or equally as strong the possibility for a radical and chaotic reshaping of material that enters this field. This is the kind of thing attempted by an artist such as Fabian Marcaccio, albeit with all to a didactic set of results (it still looks as if he is trying to describe a process rather than immerse himself in it).

Grieves: I was thinking about this earlier, but the distinction I wanted to make and it wasn't to think of a polarisation as a split, or as playing off of an-other, so to speak, but rather, in this notion of a leaning to, you get a kind of charging-up. So rather than being pronounced in contrast, one is announced through articulations and interweavings. Here then, I think there is the potential for something different to emerge, a composite, a multiple in that n-minus sense. The point is not to grasp some sort of anonymity as a reductive way out of the totalisation, a sort of charging through, but rather to work through a becoming-with in that complicit and "involved" stake Donna Haraway suggests is so pertinent to both her manifestos.17 So, and let me see if I've got you right, your idea of abstraction's atomising field is to do with this approach towards a totalisation, both a striving forward and a restraint before it, so that what one witnesses is a multiplying strand, in which abstraction breaks down into a series of composite and discrete practices: Ryman stakes out "white", Pollock stakes out "expression" etc; so that, now what you get is this stage in which as you suggested with your Heilmann example you get an almost polyvalent "anything goes" type of casualness, what Hardt and Negri would call Empire's 'magnanmious' treatment of difference.18 So I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that perhaps this notion of a polarisation, a leaning too, is less a matter of picking up fragments to make a whole, (a notion I think assumes too much, as Haraway would say, “there's always more than one but less than two”) but rather a more pragmatic sense of an engagement that is tentative but no less assertive. For Renna Spaulings this leaning too, concocts not a once and all identity she'll wear for ever, but rather, something much more mobile, it grants her not a lifestyle but a life-form that is taken momentarily from 'the total being of the city's multitude' as 'one large breeding ground for the shocks of the world, past, present, future ... all living and dying' and passing 'through her and over her'. Hence this polarisation is described as an 'attraction to something that gives a person their shape, a life its form': A lifestyle is defined by taste, or even by a taste for absence, but a life-form, here in the city or wherever, happens when a body is affected by an attraction. And whatever a body leans toward also leans toward it. So a life-form is something between bodies, in every situation, and is always new each time. These inclinations are reciprocal and improvised and intense.19 Similarly Sarah Whatmore has suggested such a composition is capable of achieving, or realising a 'relational ethics' that casting 'hybridity in a different tense', working not from 'its departure from patterns of being that went before' but rather with the question of how, in which 'it articulates the fluxes of becoming that complicate social life'.20 As she suggests, 'on this account, hybridity compels us to acknowledge that not only does "humanity" always already dwell among badly analysed composites' but that 'like nature or the non-human ... "we" ourselves, are badly analysed composites'.21
What I suppose I'm trying to get at is a way of perhaps knitting together strategies that neither depend on erasure nor omission, and that perhaps look to this atomisation as part of what Bruno Latour calls the 'modern constitution', in which all sorts of manifestations can be seen to operate and seep from within. That kind of constrained autonomy isn't what I'm after and here I think the notion of a polarisation might help, in that it takes a condition (atomisation) and turns it into a capacity.

Perkins: Hi, Patrick would you mind expanding on ' abstraction's atomizing function', I saw the images of your show (Some Broken Lines, Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington February 2011) and the works really resonated with me, particularly the found, handled, materials. The work seems to have a distorted functionality, recording your own narratives on familiar mundane objects (shoelaces and belts). Do the objects original purpose have a symbolic reading for you?

Harold: unless of course if you mean something more specific by abstraction's atomizing field which this hints at: 'Perhaps this is the effect of what I like to think of as Abstractions atomizing field, where specificities can be introduced but risk neutralization through a kind of breaking down of an elements parts, it's all usually dirt and liquid, and being made co-extensive with paint'. Here it's as though you lay painting bare, especially abstraction in that it renders any introduction from the outside prone, "neutralised" by this type of medium specificity. I don't know, perhaps that has a tactical kind of vantage but it's hardly... I mean take Braque and Picasso's use of the newspaper clippings. There that operates more in a social matrix, the same way it does for On Kawara's date paintings, or the tableaux realism of the chair's cane. That sort of lattice, or the material intrusion of a recognisable form, well these elements hardly neutralise the painting but instead give it that, well its not a "faith to materials" kind of logic, but it is part of them opening their paintings to a dimensionality, or porousness of the materiality of experience.... If that's the case then I think you could think of the ways in which these types of assemblage, or multiplying mediums, operate in painting, especially in abstraction's more reductive treatments. As you say, it lays it prone. Perhaps then, we could think of ways of approaching such tactics as loaded with the potential for a polarisation that acts as a way of stitching together, not whole parts, but through an articulated and involved "staked" form of hybridity?

Patrick: Hey Harold, what you're saying has really helped me think through a few things, and I hope in my response that I can further clarify for you Oli. For me that notion of atomization, a process that for me Abstraction seems incredibly well suited, is the generation of indifference you so aptly call an "anything goes type of casualness." Which to raise a point made earlier is the perfect way to prolong the activity of painting to infinity. We prop it up in the most corrupt way possible, by neutralizing its capacity, its effectiveness and make its products endlessly and yet meaninglessly meaningful in the most token way possible. Of course you're totally correct to introduce the example of collage in Cubism and I hoped to introduce this twofold possibility of the process in my last e-mail, where the other possibility (the first being the generation of indifference) is one of the formation of a matrix with very active dynamics. And here I think that this notion of leaning-to becomes apt because it denies passivity. One always participates and it seems to me that dynamics are made always between two or more agencies. There is no element that is simply a receptacle. I think this perhaps raises the problem of the ground in painting also where the surface, the canvas, most often still assumes that role of neutrality. And thank you for your comments on my show Oli. This allows me somewhat indulgently to segue into my own work. The original objects don't so much have a symbolic function for me, rather I see them as already complicated fields in which to participate, albeit on a certain scale. And in light of the conversation we're having I guess this works for me as the surface of the painting is no longer one into which the world needs to be introduced. I always like this feeling in what I feel are Schwitter's best little collages, where the elements are so densely interlocked that they appear to support themselves. They are themselves the ground, the active field.

Grieves: Have either or you two read Kathleen Stewart's book Ordinary Affects.22 I'd really recommend it. It's basically a compendium of anecdotes in which she attempts to compose, or better yet, reflect upon the ordinary as something that has 'to be imagined and inhabited'.23 One of the best things she does though is that she resists precisely what Patrick you're objecting to, in that she doesn't seek to recover the ordinary as the site of some sort of situational empowerment, nor does she attempt to neutralise it. Rather for her, the ordinary, and it's more effective precisely because the ordinary, far from being a site of potency is rather a resource, in which the 'vagueness or the unfinished quality' allows for a 'potential mapping of disparate and incommensurate qualities that do not simply add up but instead link complexly in differance.24 Accordingly, the sheer repetition and ordinariness no longer poses an enclosure in which identity is done away with once and for all. Given then that she suggests the ordinary doesn't reduce 'similarity or meaning' to the 'the logic of code', I wonder if you guys might be inclined agree that this attempt to think through a complexity might be indicative of the attitudes both your practices seem steeped in?

Patrick Lundberg: I suppose this notion is quite apt for me as when, in my practice, I approach something such as a piece of found scrap wood I'm never thinking of it as generalized urban detritus, as an appropriatable symbol of some kind of general aesthetic regime. That said of course I am looking for things within certain parameters, but maybe it's so that I can exploit more nuanced differences within what amounts to the semblance of a generality. For example when I go for a walk to look for materials and I pick up a range of scrap-wood, plasterboard etc, for me there is always a pre-existing range of decisions made which the objects bear. They've been painted in certain ways, sometimes neatly rolled, sometimes roughly brushed over, sometimes perfectly sprayed. Colour decisions have been made and so on and so on. And all of these markings etc, point back to different chains of agency. It remains then for me to participate in and exploit these multitudinous differences.

Perkins: Have just started reading Ordinary Affects. Already found a passage that appeals, ‘the potential stored in ordinary things is a network of transfers and relays. Fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate form and realms of life. Yet it can be palpable as a physical trace. Potentiality is a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence. A layer, a layering to the ordinary, it engenders attachments or systems of investment in the unfolding of things.25

Harold: Something I’ve been thinking about lately and it has to do with your point Patrick about how we risk turning the ordinary into another totalising structure (whereby it becomes another version of the definitive arbitrating standard). Well I've been quite struck by Jason Dodge's insistence around being interested in the actual object, not the symbolic form, or the allusion or the strayed history that surrounds it but the actual object itself because it has all that anyway.26 You could say this allows him to echo, and yet refrain entirely from the neutrality and aloofness of Stella's insistence for the factual, material object as something that just is, but what really gets me, about Dodge (and it's what makes his practice quite different from Simon Starling’s) is that you can think about earlier strategies or iterations of this technique, particularly Robert Venturi's idea that Ed Ruscha dead-pans the object/subject so that it can speak for itself. You see this particularly in Ruscha's books, the parking lots, the buildings, the business opportunities... but you can also take this deadpanning as its own subject, even its driving force. This is particularly obvious in Baldessari's throwing up of three balls in order to photograph an equilateral triangle, or just one “to find the centre of the frame”.27 It seems to me that painting, in a way, especially if there is to be a notion that some sort of abstract sensibility is capable of being deployed out of the ordinary then it too might rely on similar tactics.

Perkins:I would affirm the point you make about deadpanning becoming an attitude. With both Baldessari and Ruscha I am interested in their investigation over time. That ideas are explored sequentially, in an almost animated suspension. I think it is almost always the case when an action is repeated it engenders an attitude. It is no longer the case that material imposition affects the viewer with the “what you see…” riposte. I think there is an obtuse nature to understanding abstraction’s dogmas. Often it happens on an aesthetic level, a modernist checklist, which turns to ‘critique’. I am more interested in moving through ideas while employing a stable form (rectangle and vertical division), prolonging the activity of painting, as Patrick said. Repetition for me is a tool that dismantles my own pre-conceptions of what a painting, in all its parts can be. My repetition is an attitude and my repetition is my activity.

Patrick: Are you talking about an overwhelming attitude which might define a practice in its entirety? A mode that an artist might self consciously operate in and which gives all products of their practice coherence in as much as no single work might take up a position counter to another within the artists production?

Harold: Yes, well you risk that. It's what I was trying to talk about in relation to history and Mike Kelly's notion that the artist is infantalised by the academy, especially in relation to the pursuit of the new discovery.28 Here retrofitting history plays its card along what you were saying about the totalising structure of Modernism's painting, especially in the internal weaves of “discovery” that purport to show something that was already there in the first place. What I'm wondering about, and it has to do with the potential of the ordinary as unfinished and yet inhabitable, as a form of leaning-to. These types of tactics (as opposed to strategies a division important to deCerteau's everyday gambit against utopian Modernism's grand narratives) could be said to be occupational in those works of Baldassari and Ruscha, an occupation that my concern for painting could be said to share. After all there is considerable cross over between Richard Serra's thrown molten lead and its consolidation as material form that shares painting's concern for a tactile materiality.

PERKINS: I would agree that at some level there is a self-conscious desire for coherency but I think my work has enough counter logic in its decision making that positions actually offset each other within the series. I’m thinking here about the line and it comic inheritance and the stretcher’s formal specifics. Repetition is a common feature of my practice, with this show and with these works I've distilled the painterly information to 'basic' and limited myself to it, for the benefit of seeing the difference. Other paintings of mine have more material play but the literacy remains true to a similar frequency. To reveal the overlay that resides in the ordinary and the engendered object.

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1. John Kelsey, Rich Texts (Frankfurt: Sternberg Press, 2011); 33.
2. Hal Foster, ‘Convulsive Identity’, October 57 (Summer, 1991); 18-54.
3. Ibid, 19-20.
4. Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); 16.
5. Michael Wilson, ‘Daniel Bauer’, Artforum 49.5 (January 2011); 224.
6. Harold Grieves, ‘I’m So Ready, Kate Newby’s Open’, Un_magazine 4.2 (November); 6 - 11.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (London, New York: Continuum, 1998); 6.
8. On Gimblet’s spirituality nexus see Miranda Parkes’ essay in JDR:1 (November, 2004).
9. See, Manuela De Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 2000)
10. This banality can also be seen in Reynolds allusions to erudition, calling in the agit prop of Mao Zedong:, 'there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent', only to play it out alongside the rhizomatic involution of Deleuze and Guattari as though it was still 1984. See the show's accompanying text, 'The Meaning of Nowhere', (Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland, 2010);np.
11. Youtube the Iriwn’s 2009 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medallist lecture, or alternatively learn how he self-funded most of his art by gambling on the horses in Lawrence Weschler's biography Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees... (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
12. See Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). In particular, ‘Each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a leaning, an attraction, a taste. A body leans toward whatever leans its way. This goes for each and every situation’ (18).
13. Brian Jarvis uses this concept of an epidermalised landscape in his text, Postmodern Cartographies, The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press 1998).
14. Marc Auge, Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Trans. John Howe (New York, London: Verso, 1995) & Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia. Trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Sage, 2000).
15. In the following passage the city opens out as a fashion magazine spread, allowing certain quarters or neighboods to suddenly resemble different editorial or advertising content:
Page 129: a glowing skinned girl in pristine white tank top, summery sarong, and flip flops sits on a sidewalk bench drinking fresh fruit juice and talking into her cell phone. Page 84: all the outdoor tables of the neighbourhood café are filled with good-looking, cargo-panted creative types lounging away the afternoon. The trees, bodies, small designer-ish boutiques, the neighbourhood atmosphere, the sun, form so many idyllic scenes. In each, the morality of plump skin and healthy bodies, the uniformity of laid-back stances, and lips that redundantly pronounce individual lifestyle preferences- exactly like magazine copy. See Bernadette Corporation, Renna Spaulings (New York:Semiotext(e), 2004);14-15.
16. See, Steve Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore, ‘Living cities, towards a politics of conviviality’, Science as Culture 15.2 (June, 2006); 123-38.
17. For a summary of both these perspectives see, Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003).
18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2000); 198.
19. Bernadette Corporation, Op Cit.;17.
20. Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies (London: Sage, 2002);165.
21. Ibid.
22. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (London, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
23. Ibid, 127.
24. Ibid, 30.
25. Ibid. 21.
26. In correspondence with Peter Eleey, Jason Dodge has claimed that ‘the actual thing is important, not the image of the thing or the way it exists in space sculpturally. I am interested in the matter itself, the substance of the thing as a record... They each contain the action, history, and material that is the subject of the work’. See: Peter Eleey, ‘Poems, Poisons’, I woke up. There was a note explaining what had happened. Ed. Friederike Schonhuth, (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010); 21.
27. Trying to Photograph a Ball so that is in the Center of the Picture (1972-3), or Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get an Equilateral Triangle (1972-3)
28. Mike Kelley traces this infantilism of the artist in relation to Rosalind Krauss’ unacknowledged debt to the ‘artist/critic’ John Miller. See Foul Perfection, (Cambridge: MIT, 2003), 221-3.