Espace de l'Art Concret

Niele Toroni

Daniel Buren

Olivier Mosset

Alan Charlton with Richard Long


Espace de l'Art Concret, Mouans Sartoux, France

Although not particularly "Concrete" artists, the museum has in
its collection work by Josef Albers, Daniel Buren, Andre Cadere,
Alan Charlton, herman de vries, John McCracken, Olivier Mosset,
Ulrich Ruckriem, Fred Sandback & Niele Toroni.

Stylized Painting

It's hard to think of a more detailed account of the uniqueness of painting as an activity than Nigel Wentworth's book from 2004, The Phenomenology of Painting. But after a few pages, it is apparent that Wentworth is essentially only invested in a specific kind of practice.     

In one section he grapples with the issue of what comprises an artistic gesture. He asks: why is it that painters come to paint in a specific way? How do we explain an artist's stylistic consistency, the inimitable mark of the artist's hand, evident in each work they create? He seems to have an artist such as Willem de Kooning in mind, whom he writes about in an earlier section of the book.

Willem de Kooning in his studio, East Hampton, 1964

Photograph Hans Namuth

Stylistic consistency is a mixture, Wentworth argues, of habitual actions involving “complex motor capacities” and “complex sensory discrimination”. 

But he is aware that this is true of any learned skill, like typing, for instance. So he introduces a qualification. Typists encounter highly similar situations all the time, such that you can say that you "know" how to type. But this is never true for painting. Practice at painting can lead to what he terms “mastery”, yet never “knowledge”. His rationale for this is that even “great masters” can make second-rate works. Strong art, on the other hand, involves the painter maintaining a careful interplay between his or her practical store of forms of behaviour learned from previously performed actions (we might call these habitual actions), and the very particular conditions encountered in this particular painting. A balance, in other words, between repetition and innovation. 

Wentworth's account is full of statements about what constitutes "good" art. For him, it is about maintaining a delicate equilibrium between, on the one hand, consistency and, on the other, spontaneity. This image of an artist walking a precarious tightrope stretched between the recognizably familiar and the innovative is often rehearsed within art criticism. But the trope is not relevant to Single Road artists.  

Wentworth might well be scathing of an artist such as Daniel Buren, for instance, who falls short of his criteria. He would probably call the work “stylized art”, because there is no vital, or risk-filled interaction between the artist and the work. “Stylized painting”, he writes, "is a form of sclerosis - closed, repetitive and boring.”

Daniel Buren

Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1966

Daniel Buren

Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1967

Daniel Buren

Detail of a Work Executed in 1968

Daniel Buren

Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1969

Daniel Buren

Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1970

Daniel Buren

Detail in Actual Size of a Work Executed in 1971

from Daniel Buren's contribution to the exhibition catalogue

Guggenheim International Exhibition, 1971

On Kawara

On Kawara's subtitle for his Date Painting, Nov. 18, 1966:
"I collect the painted days."

Emese Benczúr - Should I live to be a hundred

On December 16, 1997, Emese Benczúr started to embroider the caption "I THINK ABOUT THE FUTURE" on pre-produced textile strips, which came from the factory with the simple text woven into them: "DAY BY DAY". Every day she embroiders one caption, thus the number of embroidered ribbons grows by one day after day and the number of pre-produced ones diminishes by one day after day. She had exactly enough ribbons made to last until her 100th birthday.

The artwork has been exhibited several times, first in 1998 during the Manifesta at Luxemburg, when its growth could be seen over the course of three months. The rolls of pre-fabricated material placed on the shelf held the days the artist has given herself - the future. While hung on the walls, arranged in a row were the captions, increasing in number - the past. As "future" was running out, there were more and more to see on the walls. The artist was sending the embroidered strips continuously.

One may wonder why on earth any artist would want to embroider the same words on a ribbon day after day. Even if we left out of our speculations the most obvious one, there could be several reasons and purposes that could lead to such monotonous repetitions. In general, people who are in danger for an extended period of time, or who live under chaotic circumstances would behave similarly. Here we suspect perhaps something different. The time spent on embroidering creates for Benczúr the peace, which she needs for self-reflection, for creating order in the turmoil of everyday life. It bridges personal time and external time, so that she can control what happens to her, and can attempt to catch up with the inevitable.

In other words, what occupies Benczúr's mind is not leaving a mark, not the past, but the present. At the same time, her method is fundamentally different from Roman Opalka's, who conquers time by withdrawing from it while he spends hours on end with writing numbers. Benczúr on the other hand creates the time for herself. With a strange dichotomy, she creates a piece of work, which – at least virtually – fools death. Because, even if she cannot think that she can avoid the end (because time runs out no matter what), at least she devours the time measured out for herself consciously and systematically.

István Bodóc
http://www.acax.hu/content/_common/attachments/be-port-small.pdf

Noah Kalina, Everyday, 2000-

http://everyday.noahkalina.com/

Tehching Hsieh, Allan Kaprow, and 'lifelike art'

Between 1978 and 1985 the Taiwanese-born artist Tehching Hsieh completed five performance pieces in the United States, each of which lasted for precisely one year. Immediately, they were followed by a sixth, spanning thirteen years.

One Year Performance 1978-1979

Sealing himself in solitary confinement in a wooden cage for twelve months, and being wholly reliant on a friend for his food, clothing and refuse.

One Year Performance 1980-1981

Punching a time clock in his studio every hour, on the hour, twenty-four times a day, for 365 days, without a break.

One Year Performance 1981-1982

Living outdoors through all seasons, without ever entering a building or a vehicle.

Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984

A collaboration with the performance artist Linda Montano. For a year they remained tied together around the waist with an eight foot rope, and, while the rope obliged them to do everything together, they avoided all intentional bodily contact.

One Year Performance 1985-1986

Living for a year as though art did not exist, neither as a topic of conversation, nor as a subject to read about, nor as a gallery to visit.

Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999

Following these five works, Hsieh commenced a sixth, which would last thirteen years, from 31 December 1986 to 31 December 1999. During this timeframe, Hsieh stated that he would make art, but not show it publicly.

Further details, including additional illustrations, are available at his website, one-year-performance.com.

These durational works are different from other projects discussed in these pages. Hsieh's programmes are not intended to last for a lifetime: he always stipulates in advance when they will terminate. Nonetheless, Hsieh's art is related to other long-term projects we have been exploring. Like Kawara, his projects rely on unwavering adherence to self-imposed rules. And like Opalka's statement of 1972, Hsieh also issues declarations of intent, carefully laying out his plan. But most importantly, Hsieh's 'lifeworks', as he calls them, explore the relation between art and living, and this is a theme that the work of Absalon, Opalka, and Reinhardt also raises.

In an essay called 'The Meaning of Life' from 1990, Allan Kaprow poses the question 'Is playing at life, life?'

'Life in birds, bees, and volcanoes just is', Kaprow writes. 'But when I think about life it becomes "life". Life is an idea. Whatever that idea might be - playing or suffering or whatnot - it floats, outside of time, in my thoughts. But actually playing at life in any form happens in real time, moment by moment, and is distinctly physical. ...If I think about life under those conditions, it begins to resemble a hair, a crumb, a dead fly. And that's another idea.'

'So lifelike art plays somewhere in and between attention to physical process and attention to interpretation. It is experience, yet it is ungraspable. It requires quotation marks ("lifelike") but sheds them as the un-artist sheds art.'

Kaprow's account of 'lifelike art' as being dual-focused is a helpful way to approach Hsieh's last two projects. Between 1985 and 1986, Hsieh gets on with life, or, as he puts it, 'I just go in life'. But afterwards, this lack of art productivity is presented by the artist as 'art'. In a recent exchange with Adrian Heathfield, he explained that this work was based on one rule, whose purpose was 'distinguishing art and life'. Just 'going in life', just letting time pass: this is the idea. Already it is an interpretation of experience, and so stands outside real time, as a thought, ready and waiting to be called art.

They say art is like the law: both have to be seen to be done. Hsieh's later thirteen year plan, lasting from 1986 to 1999, might have involved the artist making work, but, if he did, it went unseen. It had no witnesses. What we do know is that at a ceremony on New Year's Day 2000 Tehching Hsieh revealed a poster stating that he had kept himself alive.

"I sense no stylistic or structural development of any significance within my proposal"

Dan Flavin, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Robert Rosenblum)

1963 

"I know now that I can reiterate any part of my fluorescent light system as adequate. Elements of parts of that system simply alter in situation installation. They lack the look of a history. I sense no stylistic or structural development of any significance within my proposal - only shifts in partitive emphasis - modifying and addable without intrinsic change. All my diagrams, even the oldest, seem applicable again and continually. It is as though my system synonymizes its past, present and future states without incurring a loss of relevance. It is curious to feel self-denied of a progressing development."

Dan Flavin, "some remarks ... exerpts from a spleenish journal", Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966), p. 27.

Dan Flavin, the diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)

1963

"I've been painting this same size painting for over two years"

Ad Reinhardt, letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

13 December 1962

Archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Reproduced from the exhibition catalogue, 'Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting', Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008

Cecilia Vissers

Part of the purpose of this site is to draw attention to the wide number of artists who share a commitment to remaining consistent to a single idea. Perhaps it was Ad Reinhardt, Roman Opalka and On Kawara who provided the historical precedent for this. Thanks to their reputation and their career success, they contributed to a general recognition within art circles that continuity over time was a valuable position. In turn, it has become permissible for many other artists, from a wide range of artistic backgrounds, to celebrate the regularity and predictability of their art, as opposed to its (inevitable) variety.

The sculptor Cecilia Vissers is one such example. She has been exhibiting since 1994. Gradually over time the focus of her art narrowed, until, by 2006, she decided only to work in anodised aluminium and steel. Inspired by the directness and plainness of minimalism, she regards the materials she uses and her approach towards them as the consistent factor for all her work. The alterations she makes between each piece and the next are negligible, and consist, essentially, of modifications to the shape of a rectangle or a square. But she stresses these differences are slight by comparison to the emphasis she places on the continuity of her work.

Cecilia Vissers, Installation view, Masters & Pellavin Gallery, New York, 2012

Cecilia Vissers, Gaoth, 2010

Cecilia Vissers, blacksod bay, 2010

Absalon's Six Cellules

"I can see my life from now on, living in these conditions. I think that this year I will live in at least three of them, the one in Paris, the one in Zurich and very possibly the one in Frankfurt. And once I am living in these constructions it will be like a new starting point for me...."

Cellule No. 1 (Prototype) 1992, Paris

"The object is a constraint and, because of this constraint it exists in my life, a bit like in religions, it's like having a whole series of constraints which in fact allow us to go elsewhere, that is to say to attain something stronger, more intense. All the houses are made with the desire to impose physical constraints which will mean that this house will be very real to me, and at the same time my presence within it grows in strength, because the house is very orderly, almost anonymous, and because of this anonymous aspect that it exudes, I have a double existence, because of this orderliness."

Cellule No. 2 (Prototype) 1992, Zurich

"First, it isn't a ghetto, it's a journey that I envisage for myself in that life, because I would be moving from one house to another and my nomadic life would be a lot stronger than my life today. It would be very clearly emphasised, the fact that everything fits into a single suitcase, that with that suitcase I can move about according to my needs. Each house will evoke a different atmosphere, in which I will live, and this is the life I dream of, that I long for, it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing, a thing of joy for me."

Cellule No. 3 (Prototype) 1992, New York

"How long is the project going to last?

How long? I dream of it lasting forever. I think that my life will be short, like all our lives. That's fine. For a life-time, that's fine."

Cellule No. 4 (Prototype) 1992, Tel Aviv

"The great difference between a modernist and me is that a modernist thinks about the world, how to make it better, how to sort it out. Whereas I am not thinking about changing the world, like the avant-garde might have done. I am thinking about changing my life."

Cellule No. 5 (Prototype), 1992, Frankfurt-am-Main

"What is the difference between a guy in Tokyo who lives in a tiny tunnel with a tiny television and myself? I mean it's the fact that he dreams of living in a big house with a swimming pool and I have chosen to live in a little tunnel with a television in front of me. And for me choice is a wonderful thing. That's what I'm suggesting to others, choosing, not just blindly obeying, their personal and private inner logic that has been suggested to us."

Cellule No. 6 (Prototype), 1992, Tokyo

All quotations are from a lecture Absalon gave at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 4 May 1993. A transcription is included in the exhibition catalogue accompanying his retrospective in 2010-11 at KW Institute for Comtemporary Art, Berlin, pp. 256-71.

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.