Refusal to Yield

Artists are often seen by the general public as people in conflict with society, and yet it is through their visions and insights that we finally come to recognise our surroundings and understand ourselves. [i]

– Jim and Mary Barr

Why do we paint and how do we define what is good in painting? As most people are aware, there are paintings about painting, paintings within paintings, paintings about things, paintings of things. Painting is old school, kicking against the pricks (or kissing up to them). It is design, a currency, representational, and it is non-objective or abstract. It can often be twee, merely pedestrian and worse, dull. So what defines good? Essentially good painting stands alone as work that has never been a fill-in for something else. It is not an aside, a ‘something that I do’ among other things.

While painting is obdurate in its refusal to yield to technology, it is not a game of refusals. At a ground level, the reason for painting’s continued importance as an artistic platform is that it is based around the physical application of artistic medium to a surface, but it is not limited to just one medium. It can engulf drawing inasmuch as it is able to pick up other pictorial technologies, from the camera lucida to printmaking and more recently digital media. That it has this magnet-like tendency in common with the dominant technology in our lives, digital media, could in fact be the strongest consideration for painting’s standing in contemporary culture, as writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer has observed.[ii]

If painting is essentially a parallel, a contravention or reprieve from orthodox media in the twenty first century, why is it that among visual art platforms, contemporary painting, particularly non-objective painting, both of which periodically diminish in the spotlight next to more physical and performative cousins, can still be perceived as desirable and challenging? Answering this is tricky to unpack, but essentially the challenge is that the intention behind the making of a painting is the embedment of conceptual gestures.

The reason for much of non-objective painting’s challenge and its enduring appeal is that there is no single formula for describing painting. Attempts to ascribe non-objective ‘abstract’ artistic paintings in writing are often fated to be portentous exercises wherever the public is concerned. This is often the case if the intention is to capture all of painting within a short statement, and especially, tying it up in knots with philosophical theory.

At its most pure level, painting is a humanist challenge that presents its makers (and its consumers) with a myriad of non-objective possibilities. These pathways to explore new perspectives keep it alive and universal. Painting’s challenge therefore is fluid, in that it embodies something that was determined by its maker in a moment of choice. Writer Jan Verwoert explains; “even if it’s obvious that everything possible can be represented or said, that does not mean that the possibility is within reach. First one has to know what there is to represent or say or whether there even is anything to say. The only real possibilities are those we project ourselves. In painting and in writing, too, projecting – to put it dramatically – means ‘to wrest’ something from the empty canvas or page.”[iii]

Painters and their paintings, eventually contribute to art historical representations of the era in which their best works were made. Non-objective painters in New Zealand arrived during the second half of the twentieth century, amongst the en mass acceptance of contemporary New Zealand artists. In Contemporary New Zealand Painters: Volume 1, A–M, a canonical book in the history of New Zealand art, Jim and Mary Barr wrote “we live in a country that has been slow to acknowledge its artists and even when such acknowledgement has been given, it has too often been grudging.”[iv]

Since the 1980s, the popularity of non-objective painting internationally has fluctuated, falling out and in favour while other visual art platforms and movements have flourished. The exhibition Porous Moonlight curated by Imogen Taylor, charts a small yet important selection of contemporary non-objective painters whose work has matured in the subsequent decades.

While the art of the 1970s and 1980s in New Zealand ostensibly demanded mainstream contemplation of the various roles that artists might play in our society, the artists represented in Porous Moonlight have matured in a different New Zealand. For better or worse, we are now participants in a global environment with political and neo-liberal agendas being hashed out for the first time amidst an often anesthetised and apathetic popular culture. This gets me thinking; perhaps ‘Porous Moonlight’ is an antidote?

Matt Blomeley, 11 September 2013

Porous Moonlight was an exhibition curated by Imogen Taylor at Auckland Council’s Papakura Art Gallery (7 Sep – 19 Oct 2012). The exhibition featured a selection of works by: Anoushka Akel; Dan Arps; Stella Corkery; Nicola Farquhar; Diena Georgetti; Frances Hodgkins; Michael Illingworth; Claudia Jowitt; Saskia Leek; Denys Watkins; Amber Wilson. Porous Moonlight was made possible with support from Anna Miles Gallery, Gow Langsford Gallery, Hopkinson Mossman Gallery, Jonathan Smart Gallery, Michael Lett Gallery, and The Wallace Arts Trust.