Today we have a guest post courtesy of Matthew Ballou. He discovered a video of four painters taking part in a panel discussion organized in conjunction with the exhibit Form & Story: Narration in Recent Painting curated by Elizabeth Schlatter. Sensing that many of the insights that these painters express related to discussions taking place here at MWC recently, Matthew has written the following for us as a response to the Form & Story panel discussion, and as an invitation for our readers to begin a discussion of our own.
And so, without further ado:
An impressive show entitled Form & Story: Narration in Recent Painting took place at the University of Richmond’s Harnett Museum of Art between January 21 and May 15, 2009. It featured work by four contemporary artists, Steve DiBenedetto, Angela Dufresne, Hanneline Røgeberg, and Erling Sjovold, who all, in the words of the Museum’s press release, “explore multiple narratives through images and materiality.”
The panel discussion, which took place on January 20th and is available in the video linked on this post, was insightful and intriguing. The language used, conceptual stances expressed, and the articulate advocacy of painting by the artists was exciting to me. I was particularly energized by what Røgeberg and Dufresne had to say.
As a way to stimulate discussion here at Midwest Capacity, I’m going to highlight a few of Røgeberg’s statements, comment on them, and then hope that the great group of thoughtful people who visit MWC will take over, digging through the video (the 15 minute block between 30:10 and 46:30 is especially tasty) and presenting their own thoughts, impressions, and digressions regarding narrative in art, the work or statements of the artists themselves, and painting (representational, narrative, or otherwise) as a form in general.
I’ll get us started.
Røgeberg made a few really dynamic observations during the panel talk that are indicative of her lengthy experience and thoughtful intellectual engagement with painting. Take specific note of the underlined portions:
“…when trying to articulate a particular sequence, or a particular psychic equilibrium in paint, it will get messed up and problematic because painting is slow and it is resistant, and it is messy. And it is my reliance on paint to mess up these really very, very rudimentary imperative stories that keeps me returning to painting, and finding the relevance for the material and the medium.”
“When I am talking about story I have the same suspicion that Steve [DiBenedetto] has to the word ‘narration’ or ‘narrative painting’; that it is a kind of mandate to illustrate a text that is more perfectly rendered elsewhere. That is not what I mean when I am talking about this particular vignette-like re-visitation that I am compelled to make. It is more like a configuration of parts that doesn’t yet have a visual equivalent, so I have to invent them, and I have to feel it out kind of blindly. In some ways the feeling out is as much a pre-language, tactile feeling things out as it is observable analysis or perceptual parsing.”
“I have to say that I also rely on body types and the kind of fluidity of the paintings’ evolution. As I said earlier, I would begin with a very clear-cut idea of who is doing and who is being done to, and in the course of painting, that would always upend itself and complexify and reverse or multiply or something like that. The same would apply to all categories: biological as well as social or psychological or sexual. In some way the permeability of categories seems to be what made paint a suitable medium for me and the inevitable pollution of edges from things being wet together.”
Here we see an acceptance of the defiance of paint by the artist, but it is a kind of acceptance that does not simply surrender itself in a fatalistic or deterministic way. This acceptance is instead a wondrous recognition of the transmogrifying power of the medium. Røgeberg is not capitulating to defeat, but rather learning the contours of potential in the paint, finding ways to operate within that potential, ways in which, perhaps, her natural and all-too-human will to dominate and force materials into submission is overcome by a pre-cognitive alliance with the paint and its proclivities. It is a counterintuitive kind of effort, where one cannot make something be, but rather must participate with what it already is in order to allow the emanation of a desired effect. The painting is not simply executed, the story not simply told. Instead, the artist knows material, sensation, and intuitive manipulation and thereby arrives at a kind of accumulated end, which could not be assigned beforehand yet seems inevitable.
When she talks about the awkward, meandering, “complexified” experience brought on by the paint, her words carry an air of wonder and instinct. This procedure of painting – part highly developed knowledge, part unknown, enigmatic, flailing sensation – creates a kinesthetic experience that triangulates with these “permeable categories” and “psychic configurations that do not have a visual equivalent” to manifest something that could not have been known in any other fashion and that, indeed, may not even be known through the virtues of that passionate, painterly inculcation.
This is the Mysterium Tremendum that catalyzes the creative impulse. It is the firing of the desire to attempt to make an invisible thing visible through some rigor that exists not for its own sake, but through which one may sound the depths of a fantastic conception making itself known in tenuous visions and “inarticulate brushmarks.”
Matthew Ballou, August 2009
Thank you, Matthew.
Matthew Ballou has an exhibit at Perlow-Stevens Gallery in Columbia, MO opening September 4, 2009. Look for an upcoming post here in the near future.
To close things out, here are a few images of work by the four artists in Form & Story.
Hanneline Rogeberg, Thaw, oil on canvas, 72″ x 96″
Hanneline Rogeberg, Alloy, oil on canvas, 48″ x 48″
Steve DiBenedetto, Octotech, oil on linen, 69″x 75″
Angela Dufresne, I’m not funny anymore because I can’t take myself seriously anymore…The Underwater Opera Singer Juliana Snapper (Joolie) Posed (from “Opening Night”), oil on canvas, 48″ x 60″
Erling Sjovold, Stunt Double, oil on canvas 42″ x 56″
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not to give everybody more to do, but here is a fantastic talk by rogeberg at boston university from 2007:
http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/buniverse/videos/view/?id=81
it’s worth a watch.
great choice Matt!
i will definitely hop on this soon. gotta have a little more space in the schedule to think and post later today or tomorrow…
I find it interesting that none of the painters want to own up to making narrative painting. In fact I find Hanneline’s definition of narrative a stretch. Narrative is not a pattern. Narrative has a beginning, middle and end. I like the talk, and they all have well articulated thoughts, but I think some of their ideas are from the 1980’s (Angela, Erling). What the paintings actually do is another story.
Where does Rogeberg call narrative ‘pattern’? I’m finding ‘sequence’ in one place but not ‘pattern’.
I’m gonna call unfair on saying the ideas are from the 80s. It’s a 90s idea that painting could embrace a kind of beginning, middle, end type of storytelling (not original to the 1990s, but in vogue at that moment). Lots of ideas are datable. Which are the 80s ideas? And are you saying they are ‘should have stayed in the 80s ideas’ ?
I guess that the notion that the narrative is to be found in the act of painting, as much as in scene that’s pictured is kind of a neo-Expressionist thing, Susan Rothenberg or Judy Glantzmann seem especially like-minded. But isn’t that okay? Painting as a tool for transmitting narrative is pretty lame. If you don’t already know the story, you won’t get it from a painting. It’s always been the other way around, interpretations of narrative are good source material for painting. And, as such, narrative in painting has always been a pretty impure thing—painting donors into paintings, integration with architecture, coded messages, etc. I can’t even quite think of a word or phrase to quickly describe the effed-up things Velazquez does with narrative. These have parallels in literature, but those are extra-narrative also.
I would agree with this statement. I don’t think that these painters are rejecting the idea of narrative in painting because they lack responsibility or don’t want to take responsibility for it. they seem to recognize that narration is primarily something best arrived at through a literary form, while a painting is visual and, though may be arrived at, or expressed in sequence, remains a singular and fixed visual event for the viewer: a painting remains first and foremost a painting – through which meaning might be extracted, placed, projected etc., but it’s a painting. This, unlike a literary narrative which as a form, means very little without the meaning that is derived from reading through the form and experiencing the type of linear unfolding of meaning David is mentioning above.
i think some of their reticence about narrative is tied to the baggage associated with the term itself. their dialogue seems to highlight the difference between received, participated-in structures and found, sensed structures. is the latter any less narrative than the former? what’s the limit of what could be called narrative anyway?
when artists had clear religious narratives to participate in, they still found ways to tease out alternate reads – felt reads – that were adjacent to the “story.” and the visual fields they created bore something other than the direct narrative itself…
Picking up from Matt B: the ‘how’ is as important as the ‘what.’ And now, things are more integrated, at least as far as received ‘meaning’ goes (which, for some, isn’t even on the table, anyway). Maybe people enjoy the one-panel-comic format a little more – where you’re seeing something pivotal, and are left to infer the before and after. That seems to suit many of the painters on the panel in one way or another. It’s not a narrative so much as an opportunity for us to invent narrative(s).
I agree with Jen’s comment but I still have a problem with using the term narrative to describe the work. In fact, Angela said that “I don’t think any of us make narrative painting…language based painting falls flat”. Chris you are right Hanneline used the word sequence and not pattern. Even so, that suggest seriality and not narrative. There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing wrong with other characteristics of the work. When I mentioned that Angela’s work was from the 1980’s I was speaking specifically of her use of appropriated images and her interest in the metonymic nature of culture. I’m thinking of the Pictures artists that showed at Metro Pictures in the eighties. When she talked about her method of consuming images she concludes that is a product of her “generation”, which is the 1980’s. This if fine, my problem maybe with the curatorial framing. Why have a show about narrative painting when none of the painters practice narration? As Angela said ” when I say tragic I mean stupid”. The funny thing is that she is talking about narrative devices, but please allow me to use it to describe the concept of the show. Maybe it should have been called Working Narrative Against Itself.
In the curator’s defense, the name of the show is “Narration in Recent Painting”. So it could be just as much about Humbert Humbert as about the series of unfortunate events that happen to a precocious pre-teen girl. Narrative painting comes up in the discussion, but it doesn’t seem like the show is trying to define or examine narrative paintings. The emphasis is still on the ‘how the story is told’ the narration, rather than the narrative.
Good point. That does make a difference and maybe it makes my argument fall apart.
come on now, david. the issue here is whether the manifestation of the painting (which i view as different from the making of the picture on one hand, and different from the point or goal of the picture on the other hand) is enough to amount to a narrative or a narration of a theme or meaning.
if the point of painting is to have a point, well, we left that behind for a good many years ago. but the idea of narrative/ation being discussed here is not merely action painting or the valorization of what happens to occur or come up during the creation of the painting. i think what’s being posited here is an articulation of thoughtful, rigorous, directed making that has its goal not in a product but rather in an experience of sensation (physical and metaphysical, i think).
is that enough to call something narrative? is that enough for narration? i think so.
Matt I never said that painting should have a specific point. I agree with what you said and what the panelists were saying. Product driven work is problematic.
Matt Ballou-directed making that has its goal not in a product but rather in an experience of sensation (physical and metaphysical, i think).
Harold Rosenberg from The American Action Painters- The canvas has talked back to the artist not to quite him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue. Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a question.By its very nature, action painting is painting in the medium of difficulties.
At a certain moment the canvas began to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space to reproduce, re-deign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was going on in the canvas is not a picture but an event.
Matt I guess all painting is narrative then.
i can get on board with the idea that the process of making a painting is narrative. the act has a beginning, middle and ending.
i also think that once the event of the painting is received as an image, that a lot of people looking at the painting are going to consider its making to be the backlog story to what they suppose the story implied by the image is.
a think a lot of painters labeled as narrative painters balk at the label at this juncture.
painters make paintings based on ideas. ideas for the paint and ideas for how the paint resides on the canvas as a visual event. we get this far, and the viewer does a lot of the rest of leg work in terms of assigning meaning. i honestly think most painters reject the idea of being categorized as narrative painters, because they just aren’t comfortable having large amounts of meaning assigned to what they do by strangers.
I wonder if this discussion is leaning too far into an explication of the thought processes and evolution that painters themselves go through in the process of making art, and that a discussion of “narrative” framed thus is problematic if we are going to really distinguish what narrative entails. If narrative is inherent purely by virtue of the fact that time passed and a journey was taken during the making the painting, then doesn’t it follow that all painting (as David says above), indeed all art is narrative? Doesn’t a one-line, highly imagistic poem without a verb in it become narrative by the standard of the fact of it having been created?
This is not defining-down, but it certainly is defining-wide.
I must admit to not having sifted through the whole video as yet, but I think I also have a bone to pick with the curators, as concerns the use of “Narration” in the exh-title, and the predominance of the term “Narrative” in directing the discussion. They are just not inter-changing for me in a very congenial way. “Narrative” whether these artists cop to it or not, describes an intentionality for the work, to operate within frameworks that are more linguistic, temporal, directional. “Narration” connotes, even denotes, more a question of the relationship of the artist to what is depicted or embodied, a kind of standing beside and separate from that depiction. A Narrator has some distance of voice from that which is being narrated, even it seems in the first-person. A separation is implied. I’m just thinking of Ishmael here…he’s on the Pequod, he’s witness to the destruction, the totality of the experience, but ultimately just floats away, right?
I haven’t got this figured out yet, but until I read and listen up more on this show, I’m pretty suspicious of the use of the term Narration.
In part, I think that’s just it. The four painters are supposed to be operating in some messy middle ground. They’re not purely action painters, where the aspect of narrative comes entirely from the making. They’re not illustrators or painters of narrative where it would come from the image. I think that’s why ‘narration’ has to be the specific word. It implies author, narrator, and narrative but exists somewhere in the middle.
The other thing about that author/narrator/narration/narrative sequence right now is that, after Nabokov, none of those are really expected to be straightforward, trustworthy or even sensible in the end.
I’m pretty comfortable saying that most painting has an aspect of narrative and that could be located in different parts. Describing a deKooning as having a narrative in the act of painting still separates it from Warhol, or Koons or Kehinde Wiley where the making of the painting has been freed from any existential doubt and revisioning. And both are still different from a narrative painting.
Matt Ballou- I’m not so sure I agree that pictures with a point is something we left behind years ago. Just like we can point to examples of impure approaches to narrative centuries before ours. There are currently a lot of people making paintings with a point. Schutz goes there, or Jules de Balincourt. The success of people like that seems to have led to some interest in narrative in younger painters. The Kemper has up a painting by Ian Davis that seems to be a pretty straightforward narrative.
At some point in the full-version of the video, Angela mentions Brecht quite a few times.A ‘Brechtian hang-over’ and so on…
I think at this point there is a pointing to a type of narration (or a form of narrative) that she does feel is important in terms of calling into play the notion of the ‘voice’ of the narrator as a very subjective mutable entity/voice (also collective in a sense)…throws much of the straight-forward analysis of, as Rogeberg puts it of: ‘who is doing and who is being done to.’ out the window.
similar to what Chris is saying about narrative post-Nabokov, and also what Matt C. is saying about Ishmael…
Maybe there is a slight Barthes hangover. In the sense that “the death of the author is the birth of the reader”. I think we may be still be dealing with that.
sharon butler mentions a forthcoming show with a press release quote from harold pinter that touches on these issues a bit…
Matt, I went to school with Joe Pflieger at Northwestern. Do you remember him?
good old Roland.
…with the death of the author, writing begins…
i think a Barthes hangover is a yes here.
In the video, Sjovold at one point makes a very fleeting nod to some of this ambivalence of stance vis-a-vis authorship; he’s beginning to get into process, an accumulation of observation, coherence, the collage-ing together of disparate elements, when he mentions something to the effect that he feels in part to be standing outside the process as it takes shape. There isn’t (in my recollection) an implication of alienation here, so much as an awareness on his part of what Eco calls the “intention of the text”, something developing on its own terms that the author/narrator is witnessing as well as orchestrating.
matt, thanks for bringing up eco’s “intention of the text.” i’m chomping at the bit to bring it into this discussion… maybe others are as well?
That’s right, Matt, you know those lectures well, and are a fan of Rorty as well, if memory serves. There is ton to mine there, in terms of the complex interactions between intentionality, the artifact, and the reception of it all by audience/reader/viewer.
I’ve not read it, can someone elaborate?
The book, “Interpretation and Over-interpretation” consists of Eco’s Tanner Lectures at Cambridge, along with the responses of critics, including Richard Rorty and Jonathan Culler. One of Eco’s theses involves defining a model of interpretation distinct from both an outmoded emphasis on authorial privilege and control on the one hand, and a wanton and unrestrained validation of any and all readings, however extreme on the other. And so, between the extremes of “intention of the author” and “intention of the reader”, he advocates for a more nuanced understanding, “intention of the text”, wherein authorial goals and the interpretive schema of various audience constituencies are acknowledged, but where an autonomous life, embodied in the text itself holds sway.
He relates, for example, interesting anecdotes in which readers have corresponded with him about references they find encoded into Foucault’s Pendulum, or The Name of the Rose, which he did not intend but can recognize and find legitimate in the larger cultural context in which the work was created.
Matt, is that a defensible (or at least tolerable) read of the ideas? I get hints of this way of thinking from Dufresne and DiBenedetto in particular in the video.
i think that’s a pretty good interpretation and i too am reading what Dufresne and DiBenedetto say through this line of thinking.
yep, that’s exactly it, matt, and you’re saying it better than i would have. more and more i’m seeing a lot of art through that rubric (even having one of my grads read through “interpretation and overinterpretation” with me right now). i love the tension between eco’s romantic engagement with the text versus rorty’s sort of defiant “use” principle.
and that’s where i think (i *think*) i’m trying to come down in terms of the “form and story” show. with eco, works of art get to have a multiplicity of reads AND get to have “right” reads amidst them all. the creator and the perceiver/receiver/interpreter get to develop understandings that, while necessarily subjective, are invariably in some direct relation to the “truth” of the work – the creator from one end and the receiver from the other. their interpretations are valid insomuch as they emanate viable relationships to the work. one may NOT (sorry, richard) just “use” the work as one likes – the work dictates. the work makes demands. the work creates a range of expectations. the work projects a kind of rightness in itself that is both a part of and distinct from the inter-subjectivity of creation/perception (say, painter) and perception/reception/interpretation (say, viewer). it is, in itself, some thing that permeates and yet goes beyond the finite limitations of individual, distinct reads.
yet we may certainly say that a work is only BEING A WORK (fulfilling its intention) insomuch as it is being engaged with by preceivers/receivers/interpreters, and i’ll admit that. but the issue is not, as rorty would claim, in the work’s USE, but rather in the work’s state of opportunity. by being present in the engagement of perceivers/receivers/interpreters, the work is able to manifest the multivalent potentiality of its elements (formal, conceptual) in action. a work turned to the wall or left closed on the bookshelf is not being a work any more than an individual is being a perceiver/receiver/interpreter (or user) when they are not engaged WITH the work.
so we concede to rorty SOME of his necessity of use (which favors one side of that equation), but leave with eco the trump card that there ACTUALLY IS A WAY (x3) that the work is meant to, or may validly, function. to say this is not not to concede to the notion of painting merely as an END in its making (vis-a-vis depicting a story in white-anglo-saxon-linear-literate-western-canon-of-knowledge fashion), nor only an elaboration of the flailing machinations of inarticulate-but-really-sensitive-and-thoughtful painters (a-la the artists not willing to claim narrative). to paraphrase eco:
“between the mysterious history of [painterly, artistic] production and the uncontrollable drift of its future readings, the [work] qua [work] still represents a comfortable presence, the point to which we can stick.”
regardless of the potential reads (i.e. “uses”) to which a work may be put, there still exists the FACT of the made! this to me is what rogeberg and the others are beating around the bush about – not because they’re inarticulate (they are not, much the contrary) – but because it’s heady and uncertain stuff! this is not arithmetic – it’s a physical philosophy related to the phenomenological miracle that we’re actually conscious and extant in the world!
even the most ideal perceiver/receiver/interpreter is still NOT the “ideal reader.” in some sense, not even the artist herself is the ideal reader of her own work. this is a profound thing, and it’s something that keeps me at the easel. that i might be “returned to myself strange”* from the experience of making and seeing and doing and being – that’s what i want out of art! i don’t want to USE it – i want to be found by it, transformed, pushed and prodded. i want to be made by it. i can hardly care less than i do about products. i don’t want the work to END, i want to be found IN the work, while i make it, and then do it all again…
i’m starting to range far afield here… sorry, everyone!
*paraphrasing gregg bordowitz here
Matt B, I am sure you have already read these but WJT Mitchell has written a great deal about the demands images make. Nice comment.
I want to thank everyone for contributing to this post… there is much to digest in this exchange.
This whole issue of “narration” really touches at the core of my own interest in creating and being created by art and experience. To me all art can be viewed as a chronicle, it is embedded with a certain degree of autobiographical or narrative content. A painting and an image much like a word or a story is process of relating or encoding information, so all created stimulus takes on a quality of narrative flow.
People are left to decipher all of these fragments of information, whether word or image is created, it is all a narrative unfolding. In the end what everyone is left with is an invitation to engage in the story or process that has been rendered by the author or the artist.
I don’t think that any artist can truly escape the fact that every creation will be subject to narrative interpretation. One way or another all art conveys some kind of story or metaphorical meaning to each viewer. Whether the work is interpreted in a strictly narrative manner or not, all art (and certainly painting) conveys some narrative meaning if only through the process.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment-
This is a great post!!!
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