April 1 – 23, 2011
Opening Reception: April 1, 6 PM- 9PM
DOVA Temporary
5225 S. Harper Ave. Chicago, IL 60615
Wednesday – Saturday, 12 PM – 5 PM
773.324.2089
dovatemp@uchicago.edu
On Behalf of Painting
The Opening
You know this isn’t going to be easy. Perhaps it could be, but you don’t want the ease to be real. No, you want to spot the pattern, to feel the reward of recognition, but also be denied its complete apprehension. Our process of interpretation, and creation for that matter, becomes a pattern with built-in latent properties. You want this though because you know that eventually when the pattern you initially recognized returns you’ll experience the greatest emotional release you can semi-consciously summon. This suspenseful tension is potentially responsible for the emotional emergence found in between and on the edges of gaps where unfulfilled and under recognized expectations dwell. When making, either through creating, interpreting, painting, or writing, the question of when to start and when to stop operates with a similar undulating order. This is why process is, and always will be, champion.
Painting and writing have always been this uneasy and awkward pair. Perhaps the pattern began in the 18th century when Denis Diderot attempted to capture art with words, at The Salon of 1765. The apparatus of language was used as a means to offer commentary — descriptions and judgments — for the somewhat new institution of public exhibitions. And here it’s important to note that during this time ‘public’ was in a state of becoming, as it was ushered in by the French revolution and an establishment of a new citizenship that had gained power and instituted the first republic. Writing became an interface between the public and the artist, informing each and its other of the developing behaviors that would become both flirtatious and antagonistic over time. Perhaps the most popular example of the psychic schism between the two — the public and art — is John Ruskin’s dramatic claim that James McNeil Whistler was “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,” with his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. The court case that ensued, in which Whistler sued Ruskin for damages to his reputation, was responsible for articulating painting’s complicated relationship with time and economic value as a public concern. So, the pattern of separation, between seemingly binary characteristics, was almost universally adopted by the social development of each culturally producing identity implicated and remains a point of serious concern here, within this exhibition and essay.
Expectations
If you took note of the announcement for Nicole Mauser’s exhibition “Kinematic,” you might have scrutinized a compositional split nearly straight down the middle of its image, where a portion of a painting occupies nearly as much space as various hand-written conceptual constellations and references. There’s also a color wheel, suspended just above the edge of each and ever-so-slightly off-center. In this immediate development of expectation, we are asked to come to terms with the roles of the painting, the writing and the wheel, within the production or spin of what will ultimately become our “Kinematic” experience. In this pursuit of identifying a pattern we might assume that each element is performing in a way not dissimilar to the announcement itself; a choreography of abstract implications and a mining of rhetorical form. Does the writing inform the painting? What is informing the writing? Is each a multivalent allusion to the other? It’s here that our relentless pursuit of pattern recognition becomes ambivalent as it is mapped out over an expanded field of apprehensive potential. It’s also here that we begin our search for interpretive methods in an effort to intervene on the associative scramble. The names of other artists, the consequences of photography and distribution, film, the names of philosophers and their philosophies, narrative, history, organization, light, gesture, the painting studio, paint, primary colors, secondary colors, tertiary colors and so on, are all at play and you can expect them all. In a way, we could even consider expectation itself to be a kind of device wielded with the intent of organizing metaphors and conducting paradigmatic investigation.
But now, we have reached a turning point. Now, we need to see the limitations of our expectations and associations, and begin deciphering where all of these inputs of the external world stop effecting the internal world of Mauser’s own invention and discovery. To do this, we can only rely on our own pattern production. We must simultaneously behave like both the painting and the writing, by internally performing their activity of analyzing and amplifying the return of recognition without an ulterior end. By doing this, we bear witness to how Mauser enables us to have a palpable experience of the excitement of discovery made in each painting. We need to be the light and color.
Work
When looking at the paintings in “Kinematic,” our own image banks tell us that we are potentially seeing patterns that we’ve seen before, buried within the interplay of form and material. For those of us dedicated to the contemporary language of color, we see what is potentially a “Lisa Frank palette.” But, in Mauser’s work there’s a methodology of questioning the use of such devices that shifts between understanding the device’s meaning to its user before, during and after its application. As a consequence of a historical medium, the painter and writer must always take responsibility for historical invocation. In his essay, “Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different,” Jan Verwoert observes that “If through appropriation one seeks to (re-)possess an object, what then if that object had a history and thus a life of its own? Would the desire for possession then not inevitably be confronted by a force within that object which resists that very desire?” In Mauser’s work, we find her paintings reanimating passages from Wittgenstein’s, “Remarks on Color” (1975). Specific instances of this process are realized within the following excerpts culled by Mauser herself:
19. And I don’t have to admit that sentences are often used on the borderline between logic and the empirical, so that their meaning shifts back and forth and they are now expressions of norms, now treated as expressions of experience?
For it is not the ‘thought’ (an accompanying mental phenomenon) but its use (something that surrounds it), that disguises the logical proposition from the empirical one.
74. Where does the illusion come from then? Aren’t we dealing here with a premature simplification of logic like any other?
78. The indefiniteness is in the concept of colour lies, above all, in the indefiniteness of the concept of the sameness of colours, i.e. of the method of comparing colours.
79. There is gold paint, but Rembrandt didn’t use it to paint a golden helmet.
Disconnected from the context of its historical compression, Mauser converts Wittgenstein’s theories into a kind of perverse choreography in which the paint becomes a kind of performer, synthesizing the cognitive processes of writing with the painted gesture.
…
Dispersed Ascension or To Be Continued
Additional information for the exhibition “Kinematic,” including interviews with the artist, studio photos, a bibliography, and a conclusion to this essay, will all be made available throughout the month of April at www.kinematiczine.com. The artist will also be available, by appointment, for further discussion.
- Tobey Albright