(T)HERE

Thinking about the thinking that went into the original site analysis: "(t)here" was a way of articulating space without thinking of things in space or things in their place. "(t)here" is also the title of a painting that I have kept with me since leaving New Zealand, over there, for here, Melbourne. As it is capable of toggling between "here" and "there" the signifier used here articulates and opens up an in-between space, and evokes in addition an implied movement between the two. In implying movement it also evokes things like resonance, transformation, transport, flight even.

There is a relation of my original site analysis, a fairly conscious one then, to my "monochrome" painting practice especially as "(t)here" was the title of my last solo exhibition in New Zealand. Over the past decade painting got to the point where the stripes I presented in my first solo exhibition in New Zealand grew, overtaking and filling the entire "picture plane" of the canvas, with sides articulating the necessarily temporal history of the layered production of an often iridescent and colour-shifting "monochrome" surface. 

Those works were done explicitly as necessarily failed attempts to repeat the same painting. 

In a way the individual monochrome needs to be thought of as a moment in a history of the monochrome in a way that is rare in art, given that the individual monochrome strategically in some cases seeks to be as identical as possible to all others with its chromatic quality: to the extent that one makes a white painting (or a black one for that matter) there is no escaping the fact that the new is also a repetition of the original monochromes. Thereby individual monochromes are as different as possible from one another at the same time and (especially when photographed) look more similar to one another than to any other art: where better place to situate a practice dedicated to nuance in a "genre" of painting that is only nuance? 

I would love to curate an exhibition one day of monochromes (by different artists) of a very limited colour range, a series of exhibitions in fact. I imagine that all the nuances that come with painting practices would be visible in a new light simply because colour would be, at the limit, neutralised as a significant difference. Yet even the attempt to install in the one space a number of "all white" or "all black" or "all X" paintings would reveal the individual nuances of colour, mark and surface even more sharply. After all how different are Robert Ryman's constantly white paintings from one another when you can see them in the one space? Or those inscrutable and incredibly responsive late 5 foot square black crosses of Ad Reinhardt? Seeing a group of the "black on black" paintings by Rothko from 1964 under natural light in Washington DC several years ago was a kind of visual education about how much light could come from at first barely perceptible shadings of dark.

Back in 2009 I wrote the text that follows in preparation for my last show in New Zealand. The concept of "there", the "there is" or the "Da" of "Dasein" in Heidegger has been in my thoughts since the late 1980's when I was introduced to his work studying philosophy. I am adding it here because I still agree with the understanding of place that it implies and also because for me the constant presence of a drone of some sort in most of my sound work is for me very much related to the project of monochrome painting as well: not simply because Yves Klein made monotone music as well as monochrome paintings, not simply because John Cage was clearly inspired to finally realise 4'33" after seeing Robert Rauschenberg's pristine white monochromes but because for me, like the monochrome, the drone uses repetition and scale, duration as material. 

I'm citing this here in effect so that it's clearer the way in which I conceive of sound which is from this broadly phenomenological standpoint. Painting for me was often just an investigation into seeing, embodied and provisional as it could appear to be when one is effectively dealing with illusions if not illlusionism. My sound work clearly is a similar kind of non-scientific but definitely experimental and empirical practice that could be seen as a similar investigation of scale, colour and nuance.

I still stand by these basic observations (which is really all they are). I live with some of these works still and I think they do inform what I make in the sonic field still.

(T)HERE

Why "(t)here"?

What is named, or rather not named, but indicated, pointed to in this impossible "(t)here"? Which is to say, why "here" and/or "there", at the same time and alternatively? Would it mean to be "here" and "there" at the same time or is that, as we say, neither here nor there?

We say that something is "neither here nor there" to mean that something does not matter . . . as if to matter, to be material, significant, important to us, something must be either here, with us, or there.


So why "(t)here"? This title imposed itself upon me (I resisted it for a long time), but came to be the most appropriate way of describing the space opened up by the works themselves in the way they relate first of all to their placement on walls, in corners or on floors.

It has become almost impossible for me to photograph my works in the accepted, normative way, the way paintings are reproduced in books, without frame, reduced to the mere reproducible image, without scale, without environment, without reflection. The surfaces of my works make photography almost impossible. You always see yourself taking the photograph, they reflect other works, the sky, the walls, other viewers.

We do not float before a painting, we do not magically materialise before a painting, least of all mine: we approach it, mostly on foot, we walk towards it to see it. Our experience of most painting therefore involves some sort of placement on a floor, walking or standing upright, facing a wall on which a painting is placed.  Looking at a painting we stand "here" before it, where "here" names a certain patch of the floor that we occupy in order to see the painting there on the wall before us.

I took the photograph at the right underneath my neighbour's house in Auckland where enough light came through the window shown to keep alive a small, proportionally related patch of ferns. To me it still says, somehow, everything about my painted work and how I conceptualise it. It is in some ways the effect I am after: I would prefer that a painting be thought of as a window or doorway onto what is outside than as a mirror.

When Gertrude Stein memorably said of Oakland (if I recall correctly) that there was no "there" there she articulated in a negative form exactly what I am after in my installation of works. I want to evoke a strong sense of the "there" - I want to make a place, a place in the sense of some area, not necessarily well defined or bordered but not just empty space, space charged with some sort of intensity, some sort of qualitative difference from the void, however minimal. For me the work, the painting there on the wall or in the corner or on the floor is above and before all else some way of making a place appear. Every work of art, even those that appear to "say" little else, always says "here" or "there", in their brute presentation of something, themselves at first. Even an empty gallery, like the "voids" of Yves Klein, at the very least, presents "something" even if that something is almost nothing. An exhibition, that is a kind of spectacle directed entirely towards the presentation of something to someone, is always at the very least a way of saying "there" as in "there you go", "here look at this", "voila!". So first of all "(t)here" is the name for the works themselves as a whole but in addition when you are there in the space, there with the works, there in that shared world the works and their viewers make, each of them effectively also says "here", as in "look here". "Look here" always implies a "from there". Now because the sensations presented by my works change when viewed from here, or from there, because they present themselves to the viewer in the midst of a passage between here and there, each of them sets up an elementary differential between the place where the viewer is and where the work is. I have often told people that I paint nothing, I certainly do not make pictures of things or places but at all times things and places are reflected in my works: this reflection cannot be avoided so in effect my works change depending on where and how they are installed.

In addition the reflective surfaces of most of my work ensures that at all times the viewer can see the space in which they find themselves reflected in the surface of the work. The viewer can see at all times what the work itself could "see" if it could see - including the viewer him or herself, other works, the outside, the passage of the sun through the day. "Here" and "there" are the names of the most general definitions possible of space. It seems that "here" is always, already "here" where I am, in the here and now. Imagine yourself saying "here" to yourself while pointing to where "here" might be. Would you not point to your feet? or to your heart? If you imagine then pointing from "here" to "there" where is "there"? What is indicated as "there" is always at least at arm's length away, it's always over there or out there. I imagine your hand moving out from your heart to an arm's length away, in an expansive curvilinear gesture like the sign language for love.

What horizon is being marked out (t)here?

Is the "there" the same "there" as in "there is . . ."?

A painting is always somehow "there" in the sense of "over there" even if we, here and now, momentarily share the space it inhabits with it, we can move close to it, approach it from a distance but it always remains there where we are then. My work situates itself in a mobile and changing threefold relation between situated work, specific space and mobile viewer. This is the real "subject matter" of my work and it is one reason why I think of myself as an installation artist who uses painting rather than simply a painter. My works are not just pictures of nothing, they aim to make the viewer aware of the radius of their vision, its necessary anamorphosis and perspective, in short these works aim for a kind of proprioception of the conditions of viewing themselves.