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.
