Modern Ruins, Transitivity, and Moving Paintings
Why would anyone choose to paint at this point? How could you possibly add to something with such a worn-out history, a medium that’s fallen from grace, died and been resurrected as a zombie, never to be whole or authentic again? It’s all been done! There’s nothing left! A Sisyphean task, where all roads lead to the same destination- FAILURE.
To begin from a position of failure. To begin from the ruins, and work forward. Or maybe backwards.
There’s an important distinction to be made between two types of ruins. The Romantic Ruin, glorified in much 18th Century painting, was a site in the landscape where one could have a sublime experience contemplating a distant culture that had come and passed, hundreds or thousands of years prior. Gazing out over a picturesque vista of crumbling architecture slowly being reclaimed by nature, one could in turn contemplate their own mortality.
In contrast, the Modern Ruin unfolds around you as you watch. Pruitt Igoe, the failed public housing complex in St. Louis, MO was one of the largest ever built in the United States, and less than two decades eclipsed between its construction and demolition. Pinned as the “death of Modern architecture”, its decline made evident the factors of race, white-flight to the suburbs post World War II, poor urban planning and policy, and lack of government funds for upkeep that were the mechanics behind its failure.
Coincidentally, the architect of Priutt Igoe’s second major work in his lifetime was the World Trade Center.
In 2011 the house I grew up in was razed by the state of North Carolina in an act of eminent domain to widen a road. I was living in NY at the time, but my father took these photos to record the process. The house had stood there for 92 years- a good life span for a human. I started to think how closely the lifespan of architecture mirrors that of humans, and how at this point in history our lives often last much longer than many of the spaces we build and occupy.
A few years later, driving along the new road on a trip home to North Carolina, I passed over the site where my house once stood. I was shocked at how I did not even realize where I was at first, that I was unable to fix my position in a landscape I had known so thoroughly. The actual “place” had changed in just a few years. All specifics of what had made it what it was were now gone.
In April of 2013 I went searching for this iconic view of Highland Park, the birthplace of the assembly line and the American automobile. A monument that embodied so much of why our landscape looks as it does, and is designed as it is, today.
On my way I came across the Packard Plant, a structure that pre-dated the Ford plant. The first building of its kind to be built with reinforced concrete, and also the first to be abandoned, as Packard closed its doors in 1958. Its structure has held up remarkably well over the past 60 years, and you can find full grown trees on its top floor. When I took this photo it was on auction by the city for $21,000.
When I finally arrived at Highland Park, this was the landscape that I found. The iconic main building with the company’s lettering had been demolished, replace by a strip mall named “Model T Plaza”. But perhaps this was a perfectly suited monument. One façade replaced by another. Giant letters on a grand factory building replaced by smaller, but electronically lit letters on a strip mall. They both spoke to the wants and desires of our culture, as bookends to a century. Both trying to sell us something. I also thought the shopping center’s name was apropos…”MODEL T PLAZA”. So often places in our landscape take their name from the places or people they destroy or displace.
En route to Detroit in 2013, I visited Flint, MI. I stayed in this house. It had been bought from the city for one dollar. I was told that often a resident’s largest cost-of-living expense was their water bill. This was pre-water crisis, when Flint was still buying water from Detroit.
The neighborhood I stayed in was almost completely abandoned. I started out on foot for a day to document these houses, which are positioned in a loose ring around the city core. There were so many it was staggering. It seemed that the whole city had just gotten up and left.
I was struck by the violence that these places evoked. It made me think of Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. Both seemed to get at the notion of trauma. I wondered how repetition, something so ingrained in our media-based, spectacle-oriented culture, functioned in relation to trauma today. Did it distance us, as Warhol conceived, or does repetition create some new form of trauma that pushes forward, eventually piercing through the screen?
Before I became an artist, I worked as a land surveyor. This has undoubtably influenced the way I read landscapes. I think it ingrained in me this need to get out in the field, to explore, to find uncanny curiosities in the landscape, and then trace back these clues to understand why they came to be. It made me ask questions. Questions like, Why are the overpasses so low on all of Robert Moses’s parkways? Why is there almost no mass transit between where I live in Queens and where the rest of the art world is in Brooklyn? Or, Why does this new beltline have an exit for this neighborhood, but not this one?
I’m fascinated by how much landscapes can tell us about our culture- what we value, who we value. Between 1999 and 2001, artist Ellen Harvey illegally painted small Hudson-River school-esque landscapes on graffiti sites throughout New York City as part of her New York Beautification Project. She then compiled a digital archive and map whereby viewers could track the paintings’ current states, should they wish to go find them. I thought a lot about this work. It engaged painting with performance, mapping, ephemerality, conceptual art methodology, notions of high versus low art, and painting something which could not be sold. Reading her stories of painting these works tells so much about our culture and its relationship to art, painting, race, class, gender, and law enforcement, including her account of being assaulted by two police officers while painting one of the works. I loved how it made painting about so much more than just plastic on a rectangular surface. It put painting to work.
In my first few years out of grad school, I was grappling with what I saw as two major criticisms of which painting could not fully overcome:
1. The commodity- painting, especially traditional stretched canvas painting, was still perceived as highly commodified.
2. Walter Benjamin’s notion that “Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem could do at one time, as film is able to do today.”
In his 2009 essay Painting Beside Itself, David Joselit poses the following questions: “How does painting belong to a network? How can the status of painting as matter be made explicit? and How might painting meet the challenge of mechanical reproduction?
He argues that there are still two major criticisms that painting has yet to overcome- its intimate relationship with commodification, and its susceptibility to being arrested from circulation in a network. In other words it gets made and either (like my work) goes into the artist’s storage, or it gets bought, goes above someone’s couch, or in a storeroom of a gallery or museum, and is thus cut off from circulation as a form of art.
But he offers a way out, which he calls Transitivity. And he defines transitivity as “a form of translation where painting is entered into networks, submitting it to infinite dislocations, fragmentations, and degradations”.
I began animating my paintings in 2009. I was working on a series of paintings that explored vast changes in mid-20th Century American landscapes, sites such as Levittown- the prototype of the American suburb- and I felt I needed to make time a central component to the work in order to show the rapid changes that had occurred in such sites. What I found was that the process of making a painting move and digitally recording it altered my process and studio practice dramatically. No longer was I making marks with the ultimate, final state of the image taking precedence. Rather, every mark was in service of developing the narrative, increment by increment. Each brushstroke’s purpose was to bridge the one before it, and the one that would follow. Most likely it would be overlayed later on, by other marks needed to tell another part of the story. The painting had to be allowed to destroy itself in order to become itself. This correlated to the concepts within the work, and through the animating process the paintings became topographic terrains of built-up layers. In other words they became landscapes, or sites themselves. In the end of this process, where the painting’s imagery was destroyed or buried time and time again, only the final frame of the animation was visible to the viewer if they were to encounter the physical painting. But the history remained in the digital stills, which were converted to video, thereby excavating the painting, allowing its history and narrative to be revealed.
A number of other things shifted in my approach as a painter. I had to think in two-dimensional space as well as TIME. This applied to composition as well as color and value. The process allowed for associations to manifest over weeks or months of working on an animation. Often, unplanned directions or connections between disparate ideas or images became the driving force of the work. My studio started to function like a physical web of images, ideas, text, and sounds- I could pull one idea off the wall and integrate it into something else. After a day of painting, the product could be overlayed, mirrored, looped, reversed, split into fragments, inverted, or altered in infinite varieties, and a singular painting immediately became fodder for reconfiguration. Almost instantaneously the work could be shared via the internet, circulated across vast global networks, streamed, downloaded, copied, shared. This felt very democratic and accessible for a medium of exclusivity that normally required a trip to a gallery or museum for viewing.
Painting was now fractured and dislocated, and this felt akin to the contemporary world. Meaning was accrued though process, time, and chance. Nothing was fixed, nothing a singular truth. Multiple realities could exist, time could be split, played backwards, or could stitch together distant points.
The work was both severed from painting’s “object-ness”, but at the same time linked to it. The artwork now existed in some no-man’s-land, caught between the digital and the physical. It could not exist without both elements, yet could not fully satisfy either alone.
When I first started exhibiting these works, curators seemed to only want to show the videos. I think this had to do with a number of factors: 1. I was often grouped in with video artists, so the space was designed for such works. 2. Exhibitions with smaller budgets favored the videos which could be sent for free over the internet. 3. In museums with dedicated “video galleries”, lighting became an issue. To combat this, I began to plan future works as installations, which could not be broken into pieces.
Recently, I saw the painting for one of my first animations from a decade ago, shown alongside its video in the museum in which it now resides. I had this realization in relation to Walter Benjamin’s notion that mechanical reproduction destroys the aura of something physical. Seeing this painting that I had not seen in over 5 years, that I had spent thousands of hours on, I realized that the mechanical reproduction of my work was what creates the aura. The aura was in the physical painting, the artifact of the process, but it was also in the experience viewing the projected digital video alongside it, on the adjacent wall.
Its uniqueness in time and space, its authenticity, did not reside solely in the painting. The painting certainly held something, as it was the only physical proof of thousands of hours and months of painting, but it came to function like an artifact. To understand the work as I intended it, the viewer had to see the moving image unfold, and to see this in context with the physical object. And maybe this speaks to the notion of materiality in our world, where the word site can mean a place in the landscape, or a web address. Where a network can be both an interconnected digital world wide web, and an installation of paintings. And how time itself can be a material agent within painting.
Maybe the reason artists continue to paint is some need for physical proof that human activity occurred. A ritual that embeds the artist’s thinking and tinkering in a physical residue. But who knows whether paint or digital files will last longer? And does it even matter? Both are headed for the same fate dictated by time and entropy. I guess it’s just a matter of degree.