THE SINGLE ROAD

Roger Ackling

2012-02-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

"My intention was not to work metaphorically, or to illustrate, but paradoxically to set myself a task using parameters which seemed potentially limitless: time and space. I wanted to make a map, a visual belief structure that was a way forward for me...in the hope that something which was non visual could become visual, something potentially meaningless would become meaningful."

Roger Ackling
4 February - 21 April 2012

Ingleby Gallery,
25 Calton Road
Edinburgh EH8 8DL

www.inglebygallery.com

Bob Law

2012-01-22T07:16:00.000-08:00

From the late 1950s into the 70s, the English artist Bob Law made a series of large drawings and paintings in which a drawn rectangle closely follows the edges of the paper or canvas. Unruled, bearing all the imperfections of the artist’s hand, the rectangle often leans slightly to the right. While framing pictorial space, separating it from architectural or literal space, the rectangle also frames a void, or a depth of psychological projection.

Early examples of these works have the artist’s signature and date at the bottom right-hand corner, as in a traditional landscape, but in later drawings the signature is dropped, leaving only the date. If the artist or viewer is to be plunged into the void, then the signature will be too much of a counter weight, betraying a fear of vertiginous space. If identity is tracked across time, it may dissolve within time itself.

These large, empty canvases, identified by a crudely-painted date in the right-hand corner, make an interesting contrast with the date paintings of On Kawara. In Kawara’s work, the date has moved into the central position. It is painted in modernist sans-serif letters and numbers from which all trace of the artist’s hand has been eliminated. The issue here is time, not psychological space. It is a common property not an existential moment.

Why does the date remain in Law’s otherwise laconic paintings ? Would an anonymous, ruled rectangle not function at least as efficiently as a window on space ? There seems to be a vestige of shamanic ritual here. Through concentration, the artist draws a temenos or sacred space, in a magical act within time. The date records an occasion of shamanic flight.

Bob Law: A Retrospective is published by Ridinghouse 2011.

Quiet Days at La Tourette

2011-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

What seems to be at issue in the meeting between Alan Charlton and Le Corbusier within the Cistercian monastic context of La Tourette is a latent or denied religious tendency or affinity within the work of the painter and architect.

Certainly, there is a shared austerity, a denial of any frivolity of ornament, a gravitas that accumulates from a poverty of intention. Both Charlton and the Cistercians practice obedience to a rule.

The issue is most clearly raised in a group of shaped canvases that have a removal from each corner. At La Tourette, they inevitably read as crosses. In a small chapel, a vertical and a horizontal painting, on opposite walls, may be brought together mentally to form another cross.

But vertical and horizontal are two spatial co-ordinates. In another setting, they might read as portrait and landscape. Subtraction is as permissible as addition, within the logic of Charlton’s work.

This setting up of its own premise, and following through of its possibilities, is surely a definitive mark of the secular. Before any contextualization, the paintings demand to be read in their own terms. Any compatibility with monasticism will have to be at another level than the iconographic.

What their too brief installation in Le Corbusier’s monastery reveals is a pervasive desire in Alan Charlton’s paintings: they are receptive to light; they reach up, stretch out, cherish their own surfaces. They propose and maintain one colour at a time.

Although the formal and conceptual element in Charlton’s work is strong, these paintings are paintings.

Alan Charlton's work was shown at La Tourette
from September to November 2011.

See "La Tourette/Modulations" published by
Bernard Chauveau, Paris, 2011.

The Portrait Of Roman Opalka

2011-12-02T03:24:00.000-08:00

In a well-known tale by Oscar Wilde, a playboy and aesthete,

Dorian Gray, stays forever young and handsome. Meanwhile,

a portrait of Gray, hidden from public view, changes over time,

depicting the slow corruption of the dandy’s soul.

Wilde’s story works by reversing a basic assumption of

the spiritual life, that while the body is subject to decay,

the spirit should remain pure and unchanging, outside

the ravages of time.

The same stakes may be raised by the self-portrait
photographs Roman Opalka took throughout his great
project, as accompaniments to the ‘detail’ paintings.
While the artist is seen to age, the work progresses patiently,
apart from personal vicissitude, in an uncorrupted realm
of numbers.

We are given no indication, in either the paintings or
the photographs, of the artist’s state of mind or spirit.
But this silence resounds ! It is towards, but also against,
mortality that the artist progresses. In carrying out his
self-appointed task, he becomes Roman Opalka,

the artist we recognise as the author of 1-∞,
the keeper of his promise, one indifferent to events.

The photographs recognise change but are a record
of constancy.

Alan Charlton with Le Corbusier

2011-11-06T03:45:00.000-08:00

Alan Charlton at Le Corbusier's
Couvent de La Tourette

10th September to 6th November 2011

from Jim Hamlyn

2011-10-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Tom and Alistair,

The following are some thoughts that have been rattling
and tapping under the bonnet as I've been trundling along
THE SINGLE ROAD with you.

Familiar as I am with many of the artists you mention and
much as I have enjoyed their work over the years, I have
often found myself somewhat puzzled whilst reading your
blog. I couldn't agree more that the emphasis placed upon
such notions as 'development' and 'progress' fail to encompass
the practices of a significant portion of profoundly interesting
work made in recent decades. Indeed I'm much more comfortable
thinking of art as something that changes or perhaps even
evolves but this is where the puzzlement begins because
if some artists choose to constrain or limit the evolution
of their work - to stop changing it - then where does this
leave them/us and what insights are likely to be gained by
doing so ?

Although by no means a universal truth, there does seem to be
a common experience encountered by many artists in their early
career where they happen upon a discovery or shift in perspective
that transforms their outlook on life and the work they make.
Such transformations are often characterised by the development
of a new 'vision' that reveals previously unforeseen possibilities.
I remember during a talk at Inverleith House Carl Andre spoke
of how this happened for him via an unintendedly insightful
comment made by Frank Stella about one of Andre's works that
threw him into an utterly new conception of the potential of sculpture.
Since that time Andre has explored innumerable ways to reform
this single foundational insight and the differences, whilst often
relatively subtle, are at once inventive, playful and reiterative of
this profound realisation, that sculpture is not an addition but rather
a subtraction from space.

Genuine discoveries would appear to be as rare in art practice as
in any other area of human dealing so perhaps it is only natural
that artists should wish to plumb their discoveries as fully as possible
- whether it takes just a day or a whole lifetime. This might also
explain why artists are often disinclined to start afresh amongst
unfamiliar territory where failure and disappointment is necessarily
far more common than discovery.

However, I realise that art need not always be a quest in search of
discovery. Some artists might choose to repeat an aspect of the
tradition in a devotional act not dissimilar to that described in the
astonishing scene in Tarkovski's "Sacrifice" that you mentioned
recently. Similarly they might be gripped by 'Functionslust': a
German term that describes the pleasure of doing something for its
own sake as opposed to the pleasure of producing an effect or
generating an object of value. The emphasis being entirely focussed
on the process rather than the product - the journey along the road
as opposed to the destination. However, whilst I can very much
appreciate how some artists might be drawn into a deep relationship
with certain practices and processes, I'm less convinced (or perhaps
'less certain' would be a better way to put it) about the potential for
insight offered by the products of their activity. And here we come
back to the issue of insight which, as it turns out, is little different from
discovery really.

But if we dispense with development, progress, discovery and now
insight what are we actually left with ?

Best

Jim

Dear Jim,

It's not our purpose in The Single Road to defend, let alone
recommend, the artists involved. They represent a significant
aspect of practice which is less known than it used to be, and
less understood. We really set up the blog to draw attention to
this way of working and to try to understand it ourselves, in part
from the kind of perplexity you mention.

Your point about art making as pushing through to 'a discovery
or shift in perspective' is one that is dear to me too. Unless some
new insight is to be had from art, why would anyone look at it ?
Without a sense of adventure and discovery, why would anyone
make it ?

But I wonder if we are right to insist too dogmatically on discovery
and insight. Perhaps there are other interests and pleasures to be
had. I do find that I am glad to hear, from time to time, that On
Kawara is still alive. It seems a beautiful thing now, that Opalka
continued his life's project right to the end. No doubt I would be
mildly distressed, if Alan Charlton started to make blue paintings.

Consistency may be one critique of change, commitment of a wider
lack of commitment. Daniel Buren's single strategy seemed to work
as a critical intervention into institutions and expectations, at least for
a time. Reinhardt's black paintings remain as hermetically sealed as
they were 50 years ago, in some ways more so. Here the discoveries
are to be made around the art, as it were, rather than within it.

There is a story that Wittgenstein didn't mind what he had for dinner
- as long as it was the same every day ! This is unusual, but many
people enjoy the same breakfast every morning, wearing the same
clothes, coming home to the same person. Why should such
continuities and recognitions be excluded from art ?

In fact, the everyday and its improvement has become a strong theme
in recent art. Concern is less with the exceptional circumstance
(insight and discovery) than with the ordinary, the customary.
That is where anyone lives, most of the time. Opalka and the others
have a relevance here as artists who have chosen a set of
parameters, an everyday circumstance, a working life.

With best wishes,

Tom

Speculation

2011-09-19T09:13:00.000-07:00

Karin Sander: Chicken's Egg, Polished, Raw, 1994

Perhaps the practice of artists whose work constantly changes
may turn out to be a non-practice, a patient waiting for the next
idea to arrive. Perhaps such artists need to return, again and again,
to the waiting state, to a kind of hovering or abstention from
thought and activity, in a practice of availability.

If that is the case, then they may not be so far from artists of
the single road as may appear. Emptiness, or inactivity, will
be their continuity. Their loyalty to a silence between works
may be as constant as the commitment to a single project.

Both sets of artists will be opposed to development, to a
recognition of work and self retrieved through narrative.

Perhaps there are artists whose practice is to wait without
expectation. Perhaps their commitment is as much to
the interval between works as to the works. But this is
mere speculation...

Karin Sander: 1:10 - 3D body scan figures of actual
persons, on a scale of 1:10.

a different duration

2011-09-11T06:17:00.000-07:00

Daniel Buren, Les couleurs: sculptures, 1977,
white and green, on the main pole of the Bazar
de l'Hotel de Ville.

"Holding onto a point means exposing the individual
animal that one is to becoming the subject of the
consequences of this point. It means incorporating
oneself into the construction of these consequences,
into the subjective body that they gradually constitute
in our world. In this way, we construct, in the
temporality of opinion, a different duration, distinct
from that which we have been driven into by
the symbolization of the state."

"If there is not such a point, then the only liveable
(or survivable) outcome is the most abject
submission to reality. We find ourselves here in a
Lacanian dialectic, between the Real and reality.
If nothing punctures a hole in reality, if nothing is
an exception to it, if no point can be held on to for
its own sake whatever it costs, then there is only
the reality and submission to this reality, what
Lacan called 'the service of wealth'."

- Alain Badiou, "The Meaning of Sarkozy"

Working in series

2011-09-09T03:05:00.000-07:00

In his famous essay, ‘Three American Painters’ from 1965, Michael Fried notes that contemporary modernist painters often work in series, and he speculates as to why this might have become an appealing way of making art.

It provides a “context of mutual elucidation” for the individual paintings constituting the series, he explains. If a viewer sees a number of works “which represent essentially the same approach to the same formal issue”, then it makes the issue much easier to understand. But it also allows you to register the differences, bringing “out the particular expressive intonation of each.”

Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1960

Frank Stella, installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1964

Kenneth Noland, installation at Andre Emmerich Gallery, 1967

Philip Fisher draws on this passage in his book Making and Effacing Art, in order to make an observation about the arbitrariness of museum display. Emphasizing that an individual work of art always has the potential to be presented out of context in a modern gallery, he uses Fried’s remark to suggest that for many contemporary artists, it is the series that has become “the basic unit of work.”

“In the precise, dated series the painter rules out the surrounding chaos by supplying the context, the commentary of neighbors, for the no-longer-intelligible single work. He creates whole sections of history at once, not pictures for the whims of history to supply antecedents and descendants for. In viewing such a sequence a striking effect occurs. Once only one picture exists at any instant as a picture, the others are temporarily explication, frame, and criticism. The power of the series lies in the skill with which each picture can exchange roles; now a sensory experience, exhaustively commented on by the rest of the series; a moment from now, part of the explication for one of the other pictures. In the series we reach an authentic clarity of the part, the smallest detail of any structure comes in time to replicate the form of the whole: the series is not art, but a miniature art history.”

This comment is useful in highlighting the extraordinary care that many artists who have produced a life-long series of works have shown in regulating the terms of their reception.

For instance Roman Opalka was exceptionally scrupulous in setting up an “optimum installation” for his paintings, or Details, as he calls them. Not merely satisfied with fashioning his oeuvre into one integrative, serial whole, he supplemented the displayed paintings with sound recordings, and with his photographs.

From 1994 onwards, he went even further, and began to experiment with modifying the architecture of the exhibition space itself, resulting in what he named Octagons. In his ideal installation, the octagon would be a cellular, freestanding structure that would be erected inside a museum. It would consist of seven walls, with the eighth being the point of entry, and would be used to display seven Details. The space would be lit from above and below, and, in one essay, he stated that in addition to a guard, only seven visitors should be allowed inside the octagon at any one time.

Roman Opalka's Octagon at Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne, 2006

Ad Reinhard’s ‘outline for a book’ is arguably even more exacting than Opalka’s desire for a meditative Gesamtkunstwerk. He extends his desire to control the terms of his paintings’ reception by intervening directly in the discourse of art history. His plan was to write a comprehensive and definitive book on art that would provide the most sympathetic context possible for approaching his ‘black’ paintings.

(Click on image to view in full)

Sculpting Time (Sperone Westwater, 2008)

2011-08-30T01:16:00.000-07:00

In 2008, Steven Holmes from the Cartin Collection curated an exhibition at Sperone Westwater in New York titled 'Sculpting Time', featuring works by Josef Albers, Andrew Grassie, On Kawara, Giorgio Morandi and Roman Opalka.

In the accompanying catalogue Holmes raises a number of very thoughtful ideas that are close to our own interests. Here's an extract:

"Andrei Tarkovsky's film The Sacrifice begins with a single nine-and-a-half minute scene. In this long, continuous shot, a young boy, mute, helps his father plant a tree in a desolate landscape. While his father, Alexander, works, he tells his son the story of a monk who spent an entire lifetime beginning each day with a walk up the side of a mountain, to carry water to a dead tree. At the monk's death, the tree burst to life. The meaning of the story, as Alexander expresses to his silent son, is that it was not the water that brought the tree to life, but rather the faithful day-in, day-out ritual of bringing the water. The content of the bucket was not important; it was the act of blind devotion, the seemingly desolate and meaningless commitment to a practice, that saved the tree. For Tarkovsky, the artist must make work like the monk carried water - not hoping for meaning or redemption in any one painting, but rather trusting that through the day-in, day-out devotion of the studio, something else emerges that is greater than the sum of the parts."

Lightness

2011-08-18T03:46:00.000-07:00

With his round wooden bar resting on his shoulder,
perhaps Andre Cadere is the lightest, the least burdened,
of the artists we are considering here.

The "Barre de Bois Ronde" is a long stick strung with
coloured wooden beads arranged in numerical order
but containing a deliberate error, one bead out of
sequence.

Placed in an art context, the Barre starts an argument
with its surroundings, with the occasion, with an art of placing.
Carried around in the streets, it affirms art beyond its institutions.

Often a gadfly in the French art scene, turning up uninvited
at openings or leaving a Barre in another artist's installation,
Cadere made around 180 Barres in his short lifetime,
active from 1970-78.

If the artist is free from the tyranny of the market, from
the gallery system, from any location or context, from
the need for innovation, then the world is wide.

Unlike the work of Opalka, into which the artist's death
was inscribed from the beginning, for Cadere mortality
may have been just another circumstance to be greeted
with lyrical indifference.

Commitment here may be less to a work than a pose,
or a poise.

Roman Opalka dies

2011-08-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

Roman Opalka died on Saturday 6 August, aged 79.

New York Times
L'Express
Libération
Paris-art.com
Gazeta.pl
The official Roman Opalka website
Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi
Axel Vervoordt Gallery blog - The gallery will host an exhibition of Opalka's work (8 September - 22 October 2011)

André Cadere

2011-08-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

Cadere, March 1972, Musée Rodin, Paris

Cadere, April 1973, Avenue des Gobelins, Paris

Cadere, September 1974, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Cadere, 1974, Projekt '74, Cologne (with Daniel Buren)

Cadere, May 1975, Galerie Banco, Brescia

Cadere, December 1975, Café de l'Oasis, Kain, Belgium

Cadere, 1976, Café Florian, Venice

Cadere, 1977, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent

Cadere, June 1978, l'Hôpital International de l'Université de Paris

André Cadere died on 12 August 1978

Treading water

2011-08-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

‘Charlton’s oeuvre … evidences a seemingly rigorous, apparently logical process for the theoretically endless manufacture of self-similar things (and things, moreover, whose lack of use-value and entertainment-value renders them socially suspect). His catalogue raisonné would reveal a remarkable consistent body of work – uncannily so, particularly to anyone accustomed to comfortably periodizing an artist’s career. Changes do arise, of course, and differences emerge throughout, but a sense of development as such is less apparent. Others have noted Charlton’s admiration for Samuel Beckett’s work, and it is not difficult to perceive in Charlton’s repetitive process a Beckettian aspect. Adorno, who in his Aesthetic Theory championed the author of Fin de partie, supplies us with an analysis that might aptly be applied to Charlton’s work. “Beckett,” he wrote, “indifferent to the ruling cliché of development, views his task as that of moving in an infinitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. The aesthetic principle of construction, as in the principle of Il faut continuer [among the last words of L’Innomable], goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water, and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic …” For Adorno, “treading water” is among the few ethical responses available to the artist who finds himself or herself to be of diminishing relevance (outside the institutional and academic artworld) in an efficiency-oriented consumer culture. Not only is “treading water” a metaphor for the artist’s own irrationally persistent desire, it is also an affirmation of persistence – surely the absurd persistence – of autonomous aesthetic production, even of poiesis in general, within such a culture.’

from an essay on Alan Charlton by Michael Steger, in Carl Andre, Alan Charlton, Niele Toroni, Exhibition Catalogue, CAN – Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (2001), pp. 51-52

Lynne Cooke on On Kawara

2011-08-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

Lynne Cooke's essay on On Kawara from the DIA Art Foundation Website offers one of the clearest explications of the Date Paintings on the web.

Consistency

2011-08-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

from "Reinhardt Paints a Picture", Autointerview from Art News, March 1965

"Is it true that for twelve years, since the early fifties, you've painted only black paintings and that for five years, since the early sixties, you've made black paintings of only one size, square, five feet by five feet?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

from "A Conversation between Alan Charlton and Guido de Werd", in Alan Charlton, exhibition catalogue, Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2008

The consistency of your work is incredible; especially because visual culture changes so rapidly. Your exhibitions in the 1970s do not look substantially different to your presentations today, the context, though, has changed. Do you feel that your radical approach is a form of resistance?

I made my first grey paintings in 1969, and by the early 70s I had chosen my path. The decisions I made would have been influenced by the culture of the day. Over time, the more things change around me, the more certain I become in following this path.

Lifespan

2011-07-26T07:27:00.000-07:00

Trends in life expectancy at birth (years) for selected countries by sex, 1970–2009.

Sources: WHO Health for All Database and Human Mortality Database

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/03/16/ije.dyr061/F1.expansion.html

The artists we are considering at this site all share an ambition to persist with a single project for the remainder of their working lives. Arguably this decision makes the day when they will die seem more important than it often is for other artists, simply because it is the only factor that legitimately can conclude their continuous work.

This is why Roman Opalka seems so central. No other artist has made art-making synonymous with their entire life to the degree that he appears to have achieved. For him it is as if living and breathing, painting and counting is one and the same activity.

As mentioned in previous entries on Opalka, the pathos of his ongoing work derives in large part from the fact that he has set off on a task (to paint every number from one to infinity) that could never be completed within a single lifespan.

The progression of numbers he inscribes on his canvases is symbolic of the passing of lived time, as he experiences it in his body. Sometimes in books he captions the photographs he takes of himself simply with the number that he has just reached, as though to say “this is the appearance of my face at the moment I passed the number x”. Here, the numbers function like an idiosyncratic timeline.

4691337

4699859

Opalka’s counting out of these abstract numbers could also be said to stand for the unremitting, infinitesimal movement of finite knowledge. His self-imposed task is to know and experience numbers one by one, by painting them out while also speaking them into a microphone. In his writings, he often refers to certain numbers he predicts he should be able to attain, so long as he is able to carry on working systematically and efficiently at rates he knows are achievable. We might say he has chosen to define his life almost entirely in terms of rational and steady progress. As such he allows his life and work to be audited as though it were as incremental as a savings account, or contributions to a pension plan.

By setting out on a task that could never be completed, Opalka is aware he can only sample a tiny fragment of what he foresees could potentially be known. Very large ‘milestone’ numbers, such as 88888888, have become emblematic for him of life experiences he knows he can never have. In other words, he will never see the day when he gets to photograph his face after having passed eighty-eight million, eight hundred and eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight. In short, he has envisaged his life as placed in relation to a progression that has no foreseeable conclusion; never will he die satisfied that he has done enough counting.

How Opalka envisions his life may seem very peculiar and distinctive to him. But at least to a certain degree, everybody who lives in a rational, civilized society will experience his or her life as like this. In his essay “Science as a Vocation”, Max Weber argues that because we live in a world invested in scientific and cultural development, death itself has ceased to be a meaningful phenomenon. The ideal of 'advancement' itself has changed the status of death.

Weber’s reasoning relies on Tolstoy here, who notes that Abraham, or even an old peasant, could die “old and satiated with life”, since they still remained in the organic cycle of life. At the end of their days, they truly could die contented that life had given them all that life had to offer. But no modern, civilized person could spend their last days resting in this satisfaction. Because we are conscious that change and transformation will continue long after we have passed away, no one could ever say that their life experience has been anything other than provisional. Consequently, death itself seems less meaningful.

Opalka’s art is testament to this change in the status of death that Max Weber outlines. The artist’s faith in incessant, incremental progress has cancelled out any residual faith in the conclusiveness of the eternal.

Three Versions Of The Self

2011-07-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

Add caption

Bas Jan Ader, I'm too sad to tell you, 1970

"I go my lonely way along paths that no one has made for me."

- Michelangelo

"Why have we kept our own names ? Out of habit, purely out
of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render
imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think.
Also because its nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun
rises, when everybody knows its only a manner of speaking.
To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point
where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are
no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided,
inspired, multiplied.
- Deleuze & Guattari

"This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do
rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content
of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has
no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object
of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work,
as the privileged focus of attention or will."

- Charles Taylor

It was inevitably the case, until very recently, that monographs took
a chronological or narrative form, tracking the development of
a body of work to the course of an artist's life. Change was
understood as occurring within a sense of self or oeuvre that
could be recognized across the changes.

Contemporary practice rejects such continuity as illusory and instead
works from a Deleuzean or post-modernist model of the multiple self,
different in all its moments. Don't expect work from one show to bear
any resemblance to work from the last show or the next. In this
version, ideas arrive (often fully developed) in the breaks in
self-recognition, out of a personal or professional ascesis, from
a prompting of the surrounding culture, or in answer to an impulse
of desire.

Neither of these models seems to fit artists who endlessly produce
the same. Perhaps for them the self is emergent: they will be the
person who will keep their promise, who will carry out a practice,
who will get the work done. In this case, the whole question of a self
may be postponed, in attention to a task at hand.

Opalka: towards white on white

2011-07-18T04:28:00.000-07:00

In September 1973 Opalka completed a Detail in which he ‘crossed the million’ – as he phrased it in a telegram to a collector. It had taken him eight years, and he was now 42 years old.

In 1972, the year before, he decided to modify his commitment to retaining an absolute consistency in his canvases in one important way.

He planned to alter the dark grey background on which he had been painting his numbers, ‘to make each subsequent painting about 1% lighter than the one before it’. It is also apparent that with the passing years the portrait photographs he takes of himself are becoming increasingly lighter.

Opalka envisages the day when, in his Details, figure and ground will merge completely, and he will be applying white on white, so that the numbers become entirely invisible. At that moment, the only lasting documentation of the artist’s activity would be the audio recording of him counting out the digits as he proceeds up the number continuum.

It is clear that the whitening of the canvases is intended as a visual correlative to numerical progression. If a range of his Details were arranged sequentially, a viewer would perceive at a distance a gradual, controlled bleaching of the paintings – only accentuating the continuity of the project from decade to decade.

Opalka explained that he came to this decision to modify the colour of his backgrounds after having reflecting on how many Details he would be able to produce over the course of his life: he calculated this, apparently, based on the life expectancy of an average European. We can surmise then that he estimated he would be approaching white on white at a stage extremely late in his life.

In a similar way as Achilles will never get ahead of the tortoise in Zeno’s famous paradox, it is physically impossible for Opalka ever to attain a pure background by adding a little more lighter paint to his grey mix. In perceptual terms, however, he is now noticeably near to painting on a white background.

Opalka will be eighty this year, and it is hard not to analogize the paleness of his canvases to the whiteness of the hair in the accompanying photographs, which are now very light and over-exposed. Yet the whitening might also be perceived as symbolic of a gradual reaching towards infinity in an absolute sense.

Opalka’s art seems to constantly invoke the ideal of infinity as completion, enlightenment, wholeness – as something superior than what Hegel would call a ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ infinity (just one thing after another, going on for ever). The prospect of attaining this state is the constant underlying drama underscoring Opalka’s relentless progression.

Opalka's consistency

2011-07-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

Opalka's studio in 1972, indicating the camera and lamp positions

he uses for photographing himself

Opalka is conscious that his program needs to retain an exceptionally high level of consistency. The canvases must remain the same size (195 x 135cm), the lines of numbers must stay straight and not vary in height, his black-and-white self-portrait photographs (shot at the end of the day when the painting is concluded for the evening) must be taken always against a white backdrop under the same lighting conditions, with the same expressionless frontal gaze, and so on. Only if he strives to keep his project utterly consistent, and consciously works to constrain any differences, however slight, will tiny, involuntary variations gradually become apparent. These little variations and differences might merely register the contingencies of everyday life, such as a pause to answer the phone, or a momentary slip of concentration, or whatever. Or, they reflect his inevitably aging bodily facilities.

Opalka's final painting

2011-07-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

Opalka once called himself an “accountant of irreversible time” and it is hard to think of another artist who is more preoccupied with his own mortality.

“When will the life-work conclude?” – the artist was once asked.

“Your question concerns my last Detail, the biggest suspense of my life-work…. The last conclusion will be what the ponderous painting of the first sign of “1” started at the easel of the first Detail.”

It is clear that Opalka’s thoughts have turned on many occasions to the last painting he will ever produce, when the gradual progression of numbers will reach an abrupt halt.

In 1987 he spoke of his wish not to die in a pause between finishing one work and commencing the next, but mid-way through a canvas: “I never finish a given Detail without starting another as quickly as possible: I thereby reduce the risk of seeing my life draw to an end at the end of a given Detail, rather than putting an end to my work by ceasing to be.”

In 2004 he told his interviewer that he believed that since he would be continuing his project for the full duration of his life, death was “included in the conception of this program.” “It’s rather as if death was collaborating with the work”, he adds. “For the first time in the history of painting, an unfinished painting defines the absolute finished painting.”

Opalka's Statement of Intent, 1972

2011-07-17T04:25:00.000-07:00

In 1972, Roman Opalka wrote out a statement by hand, which has been reproduced countless times in exhibition catalogues. Translated into English it reads:

"In my approach, which is a life-long program, progression registers the process of work, documents and defines time. There is only one date, that of the coming to life of the first detail of the idea of progressive counting.
Each successive detail is one element of the whole. It is designated with the date of the first and last number in the given detail. I count progressively from 1 towards infinity on details of the same size (with the exception of 'travel sheets'), by hand, using a brush and white paint on a grey background, assuming that the backdrop of each following detail will be 1% fainter than that of the preceding one. As a consequence, I envisage my reaching the limit, where details will be counted in white over whiteness.
Each detail is supplemented by a phonetic recording on an audio tape and by photographs of my face."

A decent reproduction of a section of Opalka's first Detail (1-35327), currently in the Sztuki Museum in Lodz, is included in the French catalogue published by Flammarion in 1992.

Unfortunately the picture is cropped on the left hand side, so you can't quite make out Opalka's initial number 1, but this is still a useful illustration:

By 2010, Opalka had completed 233 canvases, and had reached the number 5600000.

Adrian Piper

2011-07-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

What Will Become of Me (December 1, 1985-on. Ongoing
installation: Hair, skin and nails collected in honey jars)

"1985 was a bad year. My father had been diagnosed with cancer
of the pharynx the previous fall. My marriage began to fall apart
in January. I sought counselling to help my mother deal with my
father's illness. My father died in April. In June I received my
senior colleagues' yearly evaluation of my philosophical work,
which they had written up after consulting a university lawyer
about how to deny me tenure without incurring a lawsuit. In it they
described my work as 'incoherent,' 'inadequate' and 'defective,'
and me personally as 'baffling,' 'frustrating,' and 'unresponsive'
(albeit 'poised'). During the following summer and fall, my marriage
deteriorated further. By the time I was denied tenure in mid-
December, my husband and I had not been on speaking terms
for weeks.

I felt sure that if I could just hold myself together for long enough
to escape from Ann Arbor, I'd be alright."

- Adrian Piper

Cuttings will continue to be collected in honey jars up to
the artist's death, when her ashes will complete the series.

Broken Clock

2011-06-07T04:11:00.000-07:00

One Hour Sun Drawing, Roger Ackling 1976

Roger Ackling burns marks on wood or card, using a small lens
to focus the sun's rays. This is a complete description. Although
the works have changed over the years, becoming more or less
complex, insisting on their own particularity or more modestly
contributing to a larger installation, the moment of focus, of
attention to making, does not change. It is returned to again
and again.

Making is a means of eliciting this quality of attention, in a moment
without qualities, out of time. While early works marked duration
in obedience to a concept ('One Hour Sun Drawing' or 'cloud
drawings' in which the marks were dictated by the coming or going
of the sun), once the moment of making was discovered, the concept
could be dropped. The intentionality of the idea is a poor indicator of
the timeless. Its content is a diversion.

For all their charisma and apparent self-sufficiency, Ackling's works
are little more substantial than the smoke given off by burning. They
exist as a residue or evidence of the focused moment of their making.
This is an art that is all practice.

Broken Clock, Roger Ackling, 1990

The Ordinary As Chosen

2011-05-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

Martin Creed, Work No 885, 2008, Acrylic on canvas

Dean Hughes describes Martin Creed's Work No.885, 2008 as
"a canvas composed of 20 brush marks made with 20 brushes
of diminishing, or increasing size, depending on one's willingness
to acclimatise to issues of scale."

"This sensibility of repetition within Creed's artwork is always
paired with a commitment to the ordinary. As a type of sensory
experience the ordinary is simple yet seemingly rich and complex.
Hum drum, quotidian, everyday, boring, malaise, normal, usual,
regular, common, mundane, all quite effectively locate the ordinary
as something closed and understandable whilst extending its
resonance by inflection."

The repetition that Creed sets up within a single work may be
established by other artists across a whole body of work, or as
an everyday practice, lasting a lifetime. Contrary to what one might
expect, this opens up a space of freedom, since the ordinary is no
longer something merely given and accepted but an area of operation
chosen and maintained.

Weather

2011-04-29T04:05:00.000-07:00

Alan Charlton, Inverleith House, Edinburgh 2002

Along the single road, it seems that the weather
is often grey. There are the grey paintings of Alan
Charlton, Opalka's white on grey, Kawara's predominantly
dark grey date paintings. The early photographs of Hamish
Fulton avoided the black and white contrasts of the period
for a range of soft tones.

Perhaps this is what Roland Barthes refers to as The Neutral,
a preference for the nuance over choice and conflict, a
"refusal of pure discourse of opposition".

Grey may be a prolonged hesitation before the possibility
of colour. Like a Taoist practice, Barthes' Neutral is a way
"to dissolve one's own image." In his book "In Praise
of Blandness", Francois Julien attempts a recuperation
of this term as aesthetic and ethical neutrality: "Blandness
should be our dominant character trait, since it alone allows
an individual to possess all aptitudes equally and to bring
the appropriate faculty into play when needed."

Whatever else it might be, this fondness for mist and smoke
is a mode of minimalist reduction, an exclusion of the inessential,
a means of letting appear that which appears. Perhaps too, on
the eve of a new art, some artists needed a veil or delay to
prepare themselves for the pure transparency of the concept.

Emese Benczur

2011-04-25T01:51:00.000-07:00

Emese Benczúr, Should I live to be a Hundred, 1988- (ongoing). Cotton.

'A similarly nuanced relationship to time is evident in Emese Benczúr's work Should I Live to Be a Hundred: in 1998 she ordered thirty-eight rolls of clothing labels machine-embroidered with the words "day by day". She then commenced sewing below this inscription the words "I think about the future", pledging to repeat the sewing of this phrase each day for the rest of her life. There are, of course, major precedents and inspirations: On Kawara's Today series, Roman Opałka's 1965/1 - ∞ series, for example. Artists working in this way share a certain quality of integration with everyday currents, an integrative atemporality - quiet, slow, unobtrusive yet committed, insistent, and independent - that is the ground zero of the ways in which contemporary artists approach the strangeness of their time.'

(from Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art?, Chapter 11, 'Taking Time...')

World Minimal Music Festival, Amsterdam, 30 March - 2 April 2011

2011-04-11T00:49:00.000-07:00

As part of the 2011 World Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam, the conductor and director Reinbert de Leeuw performs La Monte Young's 1961 piece, 461 for Henry Flynt. The work consists of the repetition of a sound, with the number of sounds being determined by the performer. For this particular occasion, de Leeuw selects the prime number 461.

He sits down in front of the grand piano installed on the stage in the auditorium at the Muziekgebouw. He focuses. Pause. The audience listens.

He clasps his forearms together as though he is about to support a great weight, and carefully but powerfully brings them down across the keys of the piano. The reverberating clash of notes is absorbed by the architecture - by the wood panelled walls, the seats, the stairs, the audience.

Another thunderous impact of sound ... then another.

Sometimes de Leeuw's head shakes as his arms make contact with the piano, sometimes not. As his arm and body position shifts, different notes colour the sound cluster.

Roger Ackling

2011-04-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

sun
.
lens
..
wood
...
time
....
burn
.....

The terms of this work are sunlight on wood. The medium
is sunlight focused through a glass lens, the material small
fragments of wood reclaimed from beaches. As minutes
accrue from successive seconds, burnt dots accrue into
lines. The work happens in a mean space between the
properties of wood and the impression of the burn.

There are traces of previous use in the wood (drilled
holes, nails, paint, machined shapes), the pieces vary
in size but all could be held in the hand. The lines give
an account of the objects whilst marking the time of
their making. We are reminded that history does not
offer evidence of the past but the story of the past
told today.

- David Bellingham

In The Affirmative

2011-03-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

No development
No composition
No judgement
No invention
No re-invention
No struggle
No lacunae
No style
No skill
No signature

These redundancies are entirely positive in effect,
involving no effort of negation.

Invariance

2011-03-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

This entry is an attempt to clarify further some terms.

It seems important to appreciate that there are two different types of ‘invariance’ – one spatial, and one temporal.

Eadweard Muybridge

Vernal Falls, Valley of Yosemite, 1872

albumen print

Let’s focus first on constancy over time. How do we identify this in everyday life? We learn to distinguish the enduring state or identity of a thing from the flux of its surroundings. We ‘see’ permanence only in relation to mutability and change.

When Eadweard Muybridge photographs a waterfall in Yosemite his camera records the virtual volume of water occupied over the time interval of the exposure, generating a strange, ghostly image that is decidedly different from the way the waterfall would appear if seen with the naked eye.

Thanks to photographers such as Muybridge, this type of blurring of the image has become a photographic convention for representing physical motion. We look at this photograph and we recognize the shape formed by the cascade of water as an ‘invariant’. But at the same time – even simultaneously – we see disturbance, flux and flow.

The recognition of temporal persistence is always a process of evaluating between what we see now, and some other moment in the past – one recalled from memory. Each fresh glimpse of anything is only recognizable to us when we can connect it mentally to ‘that’ thing, rather than ‘another’ thing. In other words, when we can say ‘I’ve seen that before’.

This is how we discriminate invariants over time. But identifying invariants over entities is different. To apprehend and acknowledge this we have to abstract a concept, or a standard, from a range of concrete percepts. When we are talking of invariants in this sense, we are really speaking about similarities.

In the case of artists such as On Karawa or Roman Opalka, viewers are invited to recognize instantly the recurring format, and to acknowledge the invariants over their extended series of paintings.

But that's not all (and this is why the term 'seriality' is not wholly adequate on its own to describe this type of art practice). This is because in their art, spatial invariance is not there purely for the sake of mere appearance. It is to be seen as deriving from another, even more profound level of continuity, namely invariance over time.

La Monte Young

2011-03-14T07:35:00.000-07:00

The American composer La Monte Young grew up in
a log cabin in Idaho listening to the howling of the wind.

Unlike the other minimalist composers with whom he is
often associated, Young's music does not evolve by means
of repetitive motifs. It lingers on sustained tones. In one of
his best known pieces, Composition 1960 No 7, the interval
of a fifth is "to be held for a long time". Harmonics hang
in the air while time is suspended in the drone.

"The Theatre of the Singular Event" and "The Theatre
of Eternal Music" were two of La Monte Young's inventions.
Melody disappears: for Young, influenced by Indian music
and philosophy, the singular is always a moment within
the unchanging, freedom a possibility of necessity.

"Once this so-called drone-state-of-mind is established,
the mind should be able to embark on very special
explorations and in new directions, because it will
always have a fixed point of reference to come back to,
to relate to; it could perhaps go further into more complex
types of refined relationships than it can in the ordinary state."

La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Marian Zazeela

Artistic development

2011-03-12T15:04:00.000-08:00

For perfectly good reasons, many artists prefer not to describe their work in terms of ‘artistic development’. They would explain that their practice is informed by conditions, or circumstances, or interests external to the realm of art, and that their work was always a response to a situation, or a certain agenda …or whatever. Arranging all their artworks chronologically – one after the other – would undoubtedly demonstrate ‘development’, but any signs of progression would probably tell you only of the shifting interests and commitments of the artist. As for the work itself, this might well display no formal or stylistic continuity at all. Hans Haacke would be a good example of this particular approach.

It is much more meaningful to speak of ‘artistic development’ when you are discussing a painter such as Piet Mondrian. Most scholars of his work stress that even though he reduces his painterly vocabulary to just the primaries, and although he insists on working simply with horizontal and vertical lines, it is still possible to speak of him refining and developing his work. Each canvas could be said to be an assimilation of lessons gleaned from a previous work, so that his art in its entirety demonstrates the overall advancement of his approach.

Barnett Newman occupies an interesting position in any discussion relating to artistic development. Every student of Abstract Expressionism knows the artist’s ‘conversion’ story as recounted by Tom Hess:

On his birthday, January 29, 1948, [Newman] prepared a small canvas with a surface of cadmium red dark, … and fixed a piece of tape down the center. Then he quickly smeared a coat of cadmium red light over the tape, to test the color. He looked at the picture for a long time. Indeed he studied it for some eight months. He had finished questing.

Barnett Newman, Onement, I (1948)
oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas, 69.2 x 41.2 cm

He had found an essential form (we are let to believe) that he reiterated for the rest of his life: it consisted of a colour field, intersected by a ‘zip’. Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings are impressively diverse. However, in contrast to Mondrian, art historians have been very hesitant in claiming that they can identify ‘artistic development’ in his mature work. Instead, they have felt that the differences between the canvases do not relate to any synthesis of previous works, nor do they evidence any radical re-appraisal on his part of his initial ‘conversion’. In other words, the differences between canvases provides no substantial indication that he is encountering and solving artistic problems based on his previous experiences as a painter.

Art historians justify their reticence in speaking of serial development in relation to Newman by appealing to the artist’s own intentions. Newman was insistent that he commenced each work as though he had never before picked up a paint brush. For him, each fresh blank canvas had to be approached as if he were painting for the very first time. He never wanted to be understood as someone who merely illustrated a preconceived idea, or just worked up some pre-existing design.

His adamance is easily queried. All the same it would be a misrepresentation of Newman to suggest that simply because his work displayed little evidence of serial development he was repeating one single practice over the course of a lifetime. In his mind, he was reinventing himself with every painting he completed.

Unlike Newman, the artists associated with this project are clear what their next work will be like. It continues a trajectory they have already established. Their art does not demonstrate ‘artistic development’. It consists of variables within a set of preordained parameters.

Hamish Fulton

2011-03-06T06:53:00.000-08:00

How we read an artist's work is often the consequence
of where we place it, in which readily-available, art-historical
category. For instance, if we assign Hamish Fulton's work to
the plausible category of Land Art, a certain content comes to
the fore: the artist's environmental concerns, his ethic of minimal
intervention, the references to and respect for native cultures.

Things look a little different if we take Fulton to be a conceptual
artist having one idea - that a walk can be a work of art. In this
case, Fulton's different interests and concerns may be read as
discoveries yielded by this first intuition. The variety of forms
the work takes, the photographs, wall texts, books and notebooks
exist as documentation leading back to the fading and irrecoverable
experience of the walk.

Hamish Fulton began to make art from walking in the late 60s,
when minimal, conceptual and land art practices were still fluid
and interchangable, in a moment of possibility before attitudes
hardened into form.

Introduction 3

2011-02-28T06:55:00.000-08:00

Ad Reinhardt in his studio in 1966

In thinking about this project, we have wanted to be clear about what could be considered a single artistic practice, or an ongoing piece. After all, many modernist artists have developed a unique, signature style that has remained consistent over a significant period of time, and still more artists would define their work as single-mindedly pursuing a very distinct field. But we are concerned with artists who have been explicit in declaring that any future art they make will conform to a set of designated criteria.

This means that we won’t be focusing on painters such as Agnes Martin (for instance), in spite of the fact that her mature work retains a remarkable formal consistency. Yet we are not aware that Martin ever insisted that her art must include the formal elements that it does, and, hypothetically at least, it is possible that, had she had lived longer, she could have gone on to paint quite differently. Were she alive still, perhaps she would be producing monochromes by now, having realised that her goals and ambitions as an artist could be attained without the reliance on a grid of drawn pencil lines subdividing the square canvas. But, for just this reason, her identity as a painter can’t be said to be reliant on any particular self-imposed conventions that would govern the appearance of her future art.

Likewise, a painter such as Robert Ryman has been very consistent in his approach over an equally long period of time. However, it might be argued that he is an artist who has dedicated his career to exploring the fundamentals of painting as a medium. He has identified certain aspects of painting that he is interested in exploring, and to which he has returned, over and over again. But this task of investigating a medium seems to be foremost for him. And this seems to supersede any personal rules that he has established for his art.

We don't want to be too prescriptive in our categorization, but it seems that artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Daniel Buren, Andre Cadere, Alan Charlton, Bernd and Hilla Becher, The Boyle Family, Roman Opalka, or On Kawara are doing something else. It is not the self-imposition of rules alone that interests us. Sol LeWitt is the artist most closely associated with this position, yet the prescriptions that define the nature of his art are specific to each separate work that he makes. Instead, we are concerned with the willingness of certain artists to define in advance the nature of all their future art, and to remain 'true' to their rules over the course of a lifetime.

Ad Reinhardt, 'Black Paintings', 1966

It is clearly the case that the motivation of the artists in this category is varied; nor do all the figures we want to examine display the same level of consistency. Maybe, for instance, we shall need to retain a subsection for artists who have produced many different kinds of art, but who, nonetheless, have kept up a single, ongoing project. One example that comes to mind is Douglas Huebler. In the early 1970s, he commenced his Variable Piece # 70, a work that consisted of an exceptionally long-term undertaking: it was to document photographically the existence of everyone alive.

Roman Opalka

2011-02-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

Roman Opalka with 1965/1-Infinity
Detail 2910060 - 2932295
acrylic on linen, Caldic Collection, Rotterdam

detail of 1965/1-Infinity, Caldic Collection, Rotterdam

In 1965, Roman Opalka painted the number 1, in white
on a black ground, in the top left-hand corner of a new
canvas, initiating a numerical series that might continue
to infinity but for the inevitable mortality of the artist.

All the Infinity Paintings are the same size, 196 X 135cm.
A new canvas takes up the count where the last left off.
With each succeeding painting, one percent white paint
is stirred into the ground, giving a gradual lightening
until Opalka will eventually be painting white on white.

As he works on a painting, Opalka's voice is recorded
reciting the numbers in his native Polish. When each painting
is complete, a photograph is taken of his face.

In all of contemporary art, Roman Opalka's 1965/1-Infinity
is perhaps the most impressive instance of a life-long
commitment to one project.

Ad Reinhardt

2011-02-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

There is just one art.

There is just one museum of fine art.

There is just one art history, one art evolution, one art progress.

There is just one aesthetics, just one art idea, one art meaning, one ART principle, one art force.

There is just one truth in art, just one form, one secrecy.

There is just one artist always.

There is just the artist in the artist as the artist-as-artist.

There is just the one art process, the one art invention, the one art discovery, the one art routine.

There is just the one art-work, just the one art-working,

just one art non-working, just one ritual, one attention.

There is just one side, one way, one freedom.

There is just one edge, one framework, one ground, one existence, one fabric, one focus.

There is just one problem, one task, one obligation, one struggle, one victory, one discipline.

There is just one negation, one value, one symmetry, one monochrome,

one touch, one energy, one shape.

There is just one method, one manner, one interlace, one overall, one overlap,

one order, one rule, one thought, one spontaneity.

There is just one shape, one square, one execution, one transcendence.

There is just one materiality, one density, one presence, one absence, one disembodiment.

There is just one simplicity, one complexity, one spirituality, one uselessness, one meaninglessness.

There is just one statement, one technique, one texture, one importance, one silence, one texturelessness.

There is just one reason, one means, one emptiness, one irreducibility, one END.

There is just one art-morality, just one art-immorality, one art-enemy,

one ART-indignity, one ART-punishment, one ART-crime, one ART-danger,

one ART-conscience, one ART-guilt, one ART-virtue, one ART-reward.

There is just one art, one artlessness, one painting, one painterlilessness, one effortlessness.

There is one difference, one sameness, one consciousnessness, one nothingness, one rightness,

one indivisibility, one diversity, one essence, one finess.

There is just one thing to be said, just one thing that cannot be said...

There is just one painting everytime.

There is just one direction, one directionlessness, one form, one formlessness,

one formula, one formulalessness, one formulation.

There is just one image, one imagelessness, one plane, one depth, one flatness, one color, one colorlessness, one light, one space, one time.

There is just one repetition, one destruction, one construction, one dissolution,

one evanescence, one abstraction, one rhythm.

There is just one qualitylessness, one object, one subject.

There is just one style, one stylelessness, one matter, one sequence, one series,

one conviction, one tradition.

There is just one participation, one perception, one invisibility, one insight.

Ad Reinhardt, Poor Old Tired Horse, no. 18 (no date)

Daniel Buren

2011-01-31T07:39:00.000-08:00

Daniel Buren's vertical bands of alternately white and coloured stripes have no internal composition, no painterly texture, no referential content or emotional impact, attempting a neutrality without intrinsic interest.

Conceived as 'a proposition', the stripes intervene in different locations, drawing attention to the location as public or private or institutional space, re-inscribed by the intervention.

To be successful in this revelatory purpose, the installation of the stripes should have a certain awkwardness, avoiding the suggestion of the ambient wallpaper they often resemble. A surprising, accidental or disturbing relation to their location, an intrusive quality, seems essential to their critical or indicative purpose.

Since the invention of the stripes in 1967, Buren's work has resolutely refused to develop.

Alan Charlton

2011-01-29T08:34:00.000-08:00

"I want my paintings to be abstract, direct, urban, basic, modest, pure, simple, silent, honest, absolute."

A few basic rules have generated Alan Charlton's entire work for nearly four decades. All the paintings must be grey, a different grey for each painting: the dimensions must be multiples of 4.5cm, which is the depth of the support.

A third rule is that paintings must be installed. Although paintings are always made with a particular space in mind, they can be moved to other locations on the understanding that they will be properly installed in this new space, rather than simply hung: in other words, they must have a considered relation to the whole space in which they are placed.

Having a cool, dramatic or sometimes aggressive presence, Charlton's paintings are more amenable on closer inspection. The paint is brushed in lightly and evenly to emphasise the texture of the canvas, making them subtly responsive to light. A combination of conceptual clarity and painterly handling gives each painting an impressive range, from confrontation to tactile intimacy.

Although generated by a system, the success of any painting is not guaranteed. Each painting is new to its occasion and situation, so that Charlton can speak truthfully in the singular; "I am an artist who makes a grey painting."

I Am Still Alive

2011-01-25T10:07:00.000-08:00

When you hear one day that an old friend has died, you are glad that his work remains, but you are sorry too. The work is no substitute. The person's stature as an artist is not good enough. You want to have more of the same. You need to expect more date paintings. You need to know your friend is still alive.

structuring your time

2011-01-25T04:40:00.000-08:00

How do you play your cards? How do you structure a life's work? These artists have imposed their own rules on what future form their art will take. And they have lived within these terms. They have made a decision, and then remained true to it. Put like this, it sounds like a vow, and, in a way, it is. They have made a promise to themselves to restrict their curiosity.

The strengths grow clearer over time. Increased consistency equals greater sense of authenticity. Quality is guaranteed. It absolves the art of being judged by this year's fashionable critical criteria. The reviewers are preempted.

But initially, the self-imposed rule might seem rash, or even eccentric. It might involve turning your back on current art-world trends, and committing to a path that could seem at the time to be antagonistic to having an 'art career'. It might involve deciding that current art world debates are simply not pertinent to your investment.

An observer might think that what started out as a game of poker has turned out to be nothing but solitaire. But to the player, this solitaire is as risky as any game of poker.

On Kawara

2011-01-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

Lining each cardboard box that holds an On Kawara date painting is a copy of that day's local newspaper. It is information that may be unpacked with the unpacking of the painting itself. Behind the abstraction of the date, there is a seething of events.

A room of these paintings can be very beautiful, a narrow range of colours and sizes changing occasionally across the years. But appreciation of their minimal aesthetic is soon drowned out in a bubbling up of content once individual dates are recognised and begin to yield their store of private and public memories and associations. Quite as much as the artist, we are contemporary with these paintings, living along with them. The dates are triggers, sharply particular in significance or carrying a more muted sense of a cultural era.

Kawara's abandoned 'I am still alive' series may be subsumed into the date paintings, but in a more sombre tone. While the telegrams registered surprise or cheery persistence, in the paintings Kawara is a survivor and a witness.

Yet whatever is happening in the news, outside the artist's control, commitment to the act of painting is constant. Most days of any year since he began this series in 1966, On Kawara has been at work, preparing a canvas, mixing paint, laying out the letters and numbers of the date, maintaining a practice through the flux of events.

Introduction

2011-01-21T04:00:00.000-08:00

Begining in the 1960s, a number of separate artists, for quite different reasons, took the decision to repeat a single practice, or to make one ongoing piece, throughout their working lives.

Since 1965, Roman Opalka has made paintings, in increasingly lighter shades of grey, of the numbers from one to infinity. On Kawara's Today series, grey paintings showing the date of their manufacture, has continued since 1966. In 1998, Emese Benczur began to sew the same phrase onto reels of embroidered tape, a practice she will continue for the rest of her life.

These practices challenge both the present assumption that artists will make radically different work at different moments in their careers and an earlier model of personal and artistic development over the course of time. The work of the artists presented here does not change, develop or mature.

In their different ways, the 'truth' that Mondrian speaks of is more at stake for these artists than style, reputation, prevailing fashion, external events or current debate. Against change, critical reception or personal inclination, they seek to be true to a project or an idea. In keeping a distance from contemporary events, the vagaries of the self, or everyday incident and distraction, they implicitly or explicitly question the relevance of these issues to the making of art.

The Single Road will explore the implications of this attitude and commitment.

introduction 2

2011-01-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

If I remember correctly, this project had its beginnings in a conversation with Tom and Laurie in the summer of 2009. At the time I was revising the introduction of my book on Carl Andre, and I was warming up to the idea of adding in a paragraph on how you might describe his 'development' as an artist. My editor had said I needed to bring up the subject, but I was putting it off. But in my mind 'development' has to go in inverted commas, because there is a strong argument to be made that once Andre figured out the type of work which he wanted to make, and set up the parameters, he stuck to it. Clearly there have been variations in material and appearance, but these don't really mark sequential change. So, the 'Equivalents', installed first at Tibor de Nagy, NYC, in 1966:

could easily be described in the same terms as this series of sculptures from Sadie Coles HQ in London from 2004:

The big issue for me was what you make of this seeming absence of development. There is a temptation to say - 'actually there's a lot of variation if you start looking properly'. And of course there is. But in my mind this was skirting round the bigger issue, and that's the profound prejudice among art critics and art historians against the idea that there is any virtue in an artist not showing evident signs of progression. We are obsessed by seeing artists in terms of life stages, and words like 'juvenilia', 'maturity', 'experience', 'late period', etc. get used all the time. That's meant to be good. If an artist does the same sort of thing throughout their life, their work is seen as 'stuck in a rut', 'repetitive', or, worst of all, 'solipsistic'.

The literature on the issue isn't that substantial, although Rosalind Krauss does raise the question in her essay on 'grids', and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe does discuss briefly these questions in relation to Andre in an Artforum review from about 1974.

Tom helpfully reminded me that it might be useful to think more historically, and consider all the artists of that generation who didn't invest in the idea that an art practice had to develop. We spent the next half hour putting together a list - Daniel Buren, Alan Charlton, On Kawara, and so on. There seemed to be quite a few. And all of them are of the same generation (more or less). So was there a precedent? Mondrian? Albers' long, extended series of Homages to the Square? Or Reinhardt's Black Paintings, which he began in 1960? Seen in this company, Andre - plus the other Minimalists - don't look quite so strange.

On the basis of this chat, I went away and typed out a paragraph or two for the book.

It was several months later when Tom proposed that perhaps we should make more of this group of artists. Why not think about all of them collectively? Such a position might have been popular at one moment, but what had happened to that ideal? And were there still artists out there who were committing themselves to one single project they aimed to continue all their life?

These seemed like worthwhile questions, and so this is why we want to set out to chart 'the single road'.

Alistair