A Mid-Career Crisis

Here is a familiar predicament for artists of a certain age.

For many years the artist X has been internationally successful making a particular work, Y, almost unvarying, perhaps quite narrowly defined. Everyone is tired of Y, including X. We’ve seen it once too often, it’s boring, the artist has no ideas etc. Yet when X initiates a change, making Z, nobody likes it. There is talk of selling out, of working for a market, of failure of nerve. Everyone is glad when Z is quietly dropped and X goes back to making Y.

Now X can be discovered by a new generation, hailed as a pioneer, an inspiration, an artist of integrity. Although X is universally applauded, receives great critical acclaim, a place in the history books, actually no one is interested in the work, no one talks about it or thinks about it, no one goes to see the retrospective shows.

Although this may apply to a style or reportoire of practices rather than a life-time project, the publicly allowable range of digression may be very small. And this attitude occurs strongly (among artists as much as collectors, dealers and arts consumers) in a field where freedom and innovation are assumed to be definitive.

The crazy (perhaps cruel) notion that an artist should do one thing may be more widespread than it seems.

Staying Single

“Purity of heart is to will one thing” – Kierkegaard

Although the telos of infinity in Roman Opalka’s project might seem to commit him to a single path, there is no real reason, other than the sheer impossibility of the task, to make this assumption, since there is no necessary connection between infinity and a commitment to it. After all, he might have painted numbers in the morning, every morning, while making some entirely different art work in the afternoon.

Since singleness is, therefore, not internal to this project, it must have come from elsewhere – no doubt, from a will to singleness or “purity of heart”. But already, if this is the case, Opalka is double ! There is the work, zero to infinity, which is one thing, and its uniqueness, or his tie to its uniqueness, which is another.

The work is thus inscribed with a double failure. In addition to the acknowledged failure to ever arrive at infinity, there is a fall from the purity or self-sufficiency of the work. Is commitment at the service of the work or is the work a mere occasion for commitment ? If not a doubleness, there is at least a doubt.

Maybe it is good to fail and to fail again. Like the impossibility of arriving at infinity, the distinct possibility of not keeping to the task is what gives the task its frisson. Perhaps Opalka’s success must be looked for elsewhere than in the rigour of his life-long project or his career-long fidelity to it. Perhaps it shines best in his acceptance of finitude, in the repeated exercise of volition.

Ise Jingu

The wooden shrine at Ise, in Mie prefecture, Japan, the central site of the Shinto religion and an important focus for Japanese nationalism and dynastic authority, has been constantly rebuilt since the seventh century. Although there have been lapses in its long history, the preferred practice is for a ritual rebuilding every twenty years.

Beside the existing shrine, a space is left empty to provide a site for the new building. The old building is then taken down to leave an empty space in turn. Ise shrine thus continually alternates between these two spaces in an existential flicker-effect or instability of identity.

Unlike iconic Western buildings such as the pyramids or the Parthenon, which are massively material and enduring, Ise’s lighter structure summons an energy that must be constantly renewed in ritual practice. The gods are invited to take up a residence which is understood to be temporary, a flow of energy or power. While Western edifices are patched up or stand until they crumble, Ise’s ancient architecture is forever new, immediate and functional.

It is essential to the rebuilding process that no change, development or innovation is introduced into the fabric of the building. Each rebuilding imagines an origin to which it returns in the timeless acts of the ritual. Although small differences must occur over the centuries, the intention is always to return to the same.

You are neither there nor here. Like the vacant space beside the shrine which, far from being a pure negation, offers the possibility of the building’s renewal, a sense of identity must be constantly recovered from emptiness and repositioned in a vision of the same. Practice is not towards some final performance but a life long checking and affirming.

see “Japan-ness in Architecture”, Arata Isozaki, MIT Press 2011

photographs Eiji Watanabe

Absalon

Absalon, Cellule 2, 1992

In 1992 the artist Absalon planned six structures, which he named ‘Cellules’. ‘I would like to make these cells my homes, in which to define my feelings, to cultivate my behaviors’, he explained. ‘These houses will be mechanisms of resistance to a society that prevents me from becoming what I must become.’

The Cellules were planned for six major cities: Paris, Zurich, New York, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt am Main and Tokyo. Two were realized.

One of these is currently installed in the voluminous, austere galleries of the Museum für Gegenwart at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. To enter Absalon’s home is a strange experience: the entire interior is less than ten metres square. You have to shuffle sideways to pass through the entry threshold. The walls, as well as the limited fixtures and fittings, are modernist white, illuminated by open windows that receive light from fluorescent strips hanging above the structure. There’s a living area to your left, with cupboards, table, stool and basin.There’s just enough room to turn around to see a tiny space containing a raised bed, with an adjoining shower/ toilet stall.

Absalon never lived long enough to fulfill his wish to live and travel between these six restricted cells. Nor did he ever claim that he would only produce one kind of work for the remainder of his life. Yet with this project he brings ‘living’ and ‘art’ into extreme, cramped proximity. 

Beyond Aesthetics

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

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard offers us a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical. Here the aesthetic is not necessarily confined to art, being instead the locus of perception, of experience or sensory immediacy. The aesthetic life is one of appreciation or deliberate enrichment of experience.

By contrast, to choose the ethical life is to go beyond self-interest and gratification, beyond the moment and its acquisitiveness, in the direction of the other, for the sake of the other. Freedom is the ability to break loose from self-concern. The ethical subject is capable of commitment, of postponing pleasure in response to a call.

While the life-time art project is hardly a commitment to the ethical life, it does seem to go beyond aesthetics, in Kierkegaard’s expanded sense of the term. Unless the project is glimpsed beyond its products or moments, the latter make little sense. The project rescues the artist from senseless immediacy. 

Niele Toroni

Each member of BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni – formed in 1966) chose an individual form or mark with which to contest issues of authorship, originality, commercialism, aesthetic consumerism or institutional relations.  Buren’s signature mark was the stripe, for Olivier Mosset it was the circle, for Michel Parmentier the striped monochrome.

Niele Toroni’s strategy was to make “imprints of a No 50 paintbrush repeated in regular intervals of 30cm”, a single motif he has continued to employ since 1967.

A form of reduced painting, this spare practice engages a series of apparent contradictions. The touch of the brush is at once generic and particular. No two brushstrokes can ever be identical yet their repetition diverts attention from individual mark making. The participation of the artist is necessary but his role is emptied of subjective content.

Like that of Sol LeWitt, much of the liveliness of Toroni’s work comes from the intersection of an idea and a place, but while LeWitt was a fertile producer of ideas for art Toroni has confined himself to one. He has rightly understood that if the place and the occasion changes then the idea can remain the same. If the motif is the same each time, then attention is brought to bear on the institutional or architectural frame.

Roger Ackling

"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

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

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

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

Alan Charlton at Le Corbusier's
Couvent de La Tourette

10th September to 6th November 2011

from Jim Hamlyn

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