<nettime> Local Colors

[Kevin Magee <klmagee@earthlink.net>]

"objecthood of art"

No color is isolated. The space between the object and the frame. Here
half the paintings are framed and half aren't. "Portrait of a Girl" in a
wood frame painted to look like leopard skin purple and yellow and pink
and blue and green in large blocks in the Portrait of EW. Not sure of
what I'm looking at, not sure if what I'm looking at is what is called a
representation. EW and Noel and Christine B. all exist or once existed,
they were people who posed, or did they pose, or were they painted from
memory, would that account for the heightened yellow for the face of
Christine B? What happens for example in the lower righthand corner of
Christine B. has little if anything to do with designating forearm or
elbow and everything to do with about a dozen soft circular brushstrokes
in half-circles mixing yellow and red and black and white and it's not
just shadow that projects a person or the thought of a person as in This
is a Thought for that Person or This is the Color for what the painter
thought of the person or thought while looking at that person why Noel's
eyes are marbled in turquoise and Miss DiLamberto and S.G. and EW and
the two Portrait[s] of a Girl gravitate around the thought of what are
eyes in a face when the look in the eyes on the face is deflected at
something or someone else, distracted--there are angles and ups and
downs spherical and diametrical and even what can be juxtaposed in a
color and the shape that emerges out of the colors meeting

"cleaved to an understanding of its deterritorialising"

the two girls outside the club clash the most color, blue and red,
anachronism of a yellow doorknob, the canvas done big to contain their
bodies in a landscape, street scene, though the assertion of depth at
the far left a curb and street turning unless it's to push the two
figures further toward the viewer and foreground them more than they
already are--would they have fallen back against the wall if the wall
ran the full length of the large canvas? Purple and blue bricks. How can
a knowledge and feel for color or a certainty about the 'right' color
that it's color and not line that impresses its expression on the eyes
(and if you are going to paint, as soon as you think about painting in
place of light tricks, digital or film, there's got to be some kind of
acknowledging of subject, subjectivity, on your part, an interpretation
that takes place in the taking of likeness taken from life the case of
the real and the net artist the other day on that French list not seeing
any difference between "virtual" and "real" and the thought that maybe
that's what drives art and the effort to complete or completely stand-in
for what exists and resists formulation in the area between object and
frame and it's plain to the one (the only one, the gallery empty for
several hours except for a passerby who comes in for a minute soaking
wet from the rain and the director in the next room sewing some hangings
for the next show) standing here and looking at these objects if that's
what they are that the frame is found in the thought of what needs to be
brought to the looking at for example the two girls outside the club

"set of contradictions that attach to readings [. . .] imbue"

from the angle at which the figures are painted placed in the position
of looking at them from the angle at which their bodies would be
presented in the life they're represented from projecting stockings and
skirt and thighs, the two nudes painting in sleeping poses places the
eyes in the position of opening a door to a room that's not the room EW
invites you into and how to paint the expression of welcome on a face,
here you are, here I am, here we are, that it produces a differentiated
impression, viewing the painting of a nude closed in on itself in sleep,
the eyes of the one looking on or at resembling a lens, a camera with a
troubled relation to its subject, and all cameras have this troubled
relation to their subject, especially when that subject is a body, and
there isn't any light that can make up for the intervention of an
apparatus in the action of looking that goes on between the one who is
looking and the one who is looked at

"mechanisms of specular power [. . .] and identity redefinition"

to paint a face is to paint the thought of thighs a form of "ideation"
that takes shape in the mind for the movement outside oneself and in the
direction of another that's penetrative and there is that to looking,
the penetrating eyes on a body are eyes trying to find a way to that
body and that's why the Portrait of EW and the two girls outside the
club (the largest painting and it has no title) could be said to be
saying, if a painting ever says anything, to whoever looks at them to
take a good look, that it's worth looking at, the "secret" the absence
of any name for which is the absence of any name on it, the object, the
thing we're made into being, and it's not anything anybody knows or
can't say, though it's possible that the completion of the body in the
experience of its sexuality has never been named, and that this is what
drives art, an interiority that's so elusive it keeps refusing to be
named or figured or sounded, the "it" that drives subjectivity and which
circulates or short-circuits all around the representations for it, and
maybe that's why someone might paint in oil and oil and pastel as much
as to say that the body is still around, or maybe that's all anybody
ever had and having it is to have none of the illusion that it can
really be said with any truthfulness outside the art for it

"<italic>Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers</italic>"

You can have it. Where is what is yours is mine was found with yours is
what was mine is mind.

"the double lack at the heart of language, the absence of signifieds as
things-in-themselves and . . . and as an ungraspable flow beneath a
network of signifiers [. . .] markers that embody it"

and that's where looking at these paintings again on November 26, mid
afternoon, a month after first looking at them on the 22 and 24 of
October (stopping by a couple of times each week and the gallery's
always closed, it's that "private" or maybe that's what it takes to be
"Independent") after writing for the Fiction-of-Philosophy list "a
limine," "aperçu," "agencement," "chiffre," "coup d'oeil," "coupure,"
"dunamis," "échiffre," "linge sal," "non-su," "recherche," "rivetage,"
"stile rappresentivo," "usager," "vel," "verriers," and "voix pour voir
/ voiture" somewhere at the paintings so far, somewhere "at" that void
between object and frame, really wanting to write a series of poems that
wouldn't pretend to be able to co-exist alongside them, a set of poems
that would project rather what it is to be a viewer and how trying to
think about and find a language for what you've looked at brackets off
the viewed objects (the director agreeing with me as I was leaving the
gallery that you could never put these paintings on the 'net,') a series
of poems that would materialize around the thought that one of my
co-workers gave to me at the plant, in a fit of laughter over the
expression "clean my house," and the thought came to me that the face
that turns its expression to the painter is saying "paint my house," the
intensity of seeing being of that nature where the exchange of looking
has already looked past the act of looking in the search for that area
between object and frame which is touching

"uncoupling of identity from its material substrate (the human body,
physical space, being in time etc.)"

and no web site I've clicked across since beginning to explore the
internet at the beginning of this year has impressed me as being much
more than a screen or set of screens for this difficulty, which remains
a verbal difficulty, and whether or not it's any less or more of a
screen for physicality than ink or paint would seem a little early to
speculate about apart from the effort to think about how composition and
the 'finishing touch' differs from the problem of manipulating image and
thought and impulse and the powerlessness a viewer can experience
especially if that viewer is one that has been constructed for subaltern
if not subhuman mental and manual tasks, and there will never be enough
thought about this,

"flux and mobility . . . to flit the viewer in and out of . . . an
indeterminate relationship to the author . . . and to a point of origin"

that there's a discourse already developed around the new technology and
all the info/waste it puts at one's fingertips as part of the abolition
of traditional time and space frames, not that it didn't know how to
think or couldn't think for itself but that the thinking that's done by
a subjectivity that's been constructed to do the dirty work, as the
saying goes, whether it's cotton or cardboard or any other product that
can't be automatized and won't be anytime soon and the vigilance that's
needed to foreground in a consumer-driven economy that's global now that
the availability of even the most innocuous products depend on
destroying a layer of the population, driving the standard of what is
considered living to the lowest possible threshold where consciousness
is still physical and looks and tastes and touches and it's in the
specificity of this context that Zizek's footnote in The Indivisible
Remainder about Lenin and the "Cause" reads way off base, and Edward
Maroli's portraits are about this, and how they're about it in a way
that's hard to put into a thought is that it's about art and time and
the lags or lapses in history and that's what consciousness and class
and the phenomenon of someone standing here in a room Cézanne would not
have immediately turned around in and stomped out of and looking at a
set of takes on The Portrait of a Lady neo-old style and obdurately
working class because women still get called that in all seriousness on
the shopfloor and outside the club. "The forming of the senses is a
labor of the entire history of the world." One differentiation that
might be located among the thought of class and sexuality, virtuality
and the social real could have something to do with that comment from
Marx about just how long a time history really is and that art has been
and keeps being about the senses and their development

"'mechanisation' [. . .] uncoupled from the notion of the artist's
touch"

and here the problem of what is an art object and what is the work it
does and who does it do it for and how does it do what it does for you
if it does something for me that it doesn't do for you and it gets
caught up in a discourse about technology and consciousness and new and
old forms of looking and thinking and again these 20 paintings by Edward
Maroli in a room called Independent Art represent to me more than the
durability or even the obstinacy of a work in oil, but the coinciding
within postmodernity of a world where the way of looking at it and
thinking about it has everything to do with the way the people who are
painting are looking at you and thinking about you in turn, it's that
reciprocal, or dialectical, a relation, these people who appear out of
nowhere and enter your life in the flesh resonating a subjectivity that
can only be shown in a medium that history still hasn't had enough of.
This is a history that will be lived and written and painted by and for
a class next to invisible in the previous century apart from relatively
brief eruptions that only seem to arrive out of no where, what Gramsci
in a letter to Tania Schucht on October 19, 1931, thinking about peasant
uprisings, compared to "the elementary forces of nature, and they awaken
the same panic as earthquakes and cyclones," and Luxemberg used much the
same language in her mass strike pamphlet. It's not about starting over
or starting from scratch and it's not about forgetting or worse,
ignoring technology. It's about whatever exists somewhere between object
and frame, the art that would still make something from someone so that
somebody else can look at it and think with it about what kind of act is
this looking at how the paint has been put on the wood or canvas and
what is a portrait, and why does all that is human and fragile and
marred about representation keep getting painted? Dismiss or just look
past an artist who insists on doing it neo old-style, making objects out
of people and painting them from life, and you move with that dismissive
act into an area that can't be articulated outside any discussion of
social class where somewhere among it the thought ought to be able to be
proposed that what internet subjectivity makes available and how it does
that can't somehow be disassociated from Giorgio Agamben's most
Trotskyist moment in the Coming Community where he writes about the
professional classes, the educated classes--and it doesn't have anything
to do with income, or access to material goods, or quality of life, it's
the relation to production, and cultural production in particular--and
the indeterminacy of their continued existence between what might be
called the object and frame of history, the irreconcilable conflict
between labor and capital

"the boundaries separating art [. . .] and life."


Note: The quotes are from Josephine Berry's "Information as Muse [part
1]" posted to this list on 25.10.99



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