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“Evil is the reason for Consciousness/Flesh is the reason for Oil paint/the meaning of substance—the meaning of unmeaningness/Cruelty as a condition of art.” |
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Pornographic Matter – Shane Phelps
“Evil is the reason for Consciousness/Flesh is the reason for Oil paint/the meaning of substance—the meaning of unmeaningness/Cruelty as a condition of art.”
When I was invited to Perry McPartland’s studio to write a review of the works in his forthcoming show in Norway, I spotted the above-quoted note stuck in a corner. I couldn’t resist making a copy—it being a rare and singular example of forthrightness from an artist whose work is habitually wrapped in antagonistic fogs of dissimulation and misdirection.
McPartland’s earlier paintings were a palimpsest of image and obfuscation; a virtuoso mud of matter realised through a series of negations, counters and disclaimers.
Their adverted and significant nature repeatedly refuted itself—as a glance at some might prove: Not Red Landscape, Edited Sunburnt Woman, Landscape Painted Over Porn Image Painted Over. At each turn, they worked to disseminate our trust in them—displaying both a conceptual and physical reluctance to settle. Their doubled ontology was reminiscent of Craig-Martin’s Oak Tree, and partook of a similar nominative insistence. In material terms, his employment of the paint as a mark of erasure reified it substantially. At the same time, it confuted the distinguishing of the image from itself. Neither figurative nor abstract, at their most successful the works are a glorious insensate mess—veneered just lightly with some inside-out art meanings.
Rather than continue straddling this neither/nor, McPartland’s new works, Shots from a Porn Movie commit—it would seem—to a kind of figuration. Yet the harrying together of the mutually exclusive remains a central concern. The paintings don’t reiterate the dimensions of a T.V. or movie screen, instead each canvas is five and a half feet square, and evinces a tight, shallow space. The first set, Inside a Car is made up of nine paintings in dark, close tones while House (four paintings) offers a false dawn in its appropriation of Bonnard’s radiant, warm palette—yet the most cursory inspection quickly reminds us that he too could be a distinctly cruel painter. The titling retains the somewhat manic and sedulous determination of before, e.g., Shots from a Porn Movie, Scene One—Inside a Car: 5, Back Window of Car with Girl’s Forehead, yet, in keeping with the artist’s contrariness, the images are obtuse. I can’t, with confidence, claim I identified the title image of all 13 paintings. Rendered in glossy gluts and scrapes, visceral and tremulously raw, the paint overwhelms each image with its obstinate physicality.
The represented objects themselves—with the possible exception of one image—are innocuous, quotidian and trivial: rear view mirrors, car windows, doors. This selection of subject matter, together with their scale and framing, seems to indicate a deliberate cropping or editing; and even when the images are taken in series, no narrative hints emerge. As in the earlier works, the stipulated subject manner—the porn film—is addressed in inverted terms, and this entails that its presence remains throughout, looming yet indefinable.
When I suggested a correlation between an image coagulated into matter with the pornographic body debased into object, McPartland countered, “I’m not sure that paintings speak like that—in correlations.” So I asked how the Dostoevsky quote related to the porn. He answered, “At his most radical, Dostoevsky suggests that evil is the reason for human consciousness. That in its rubs and self-tweaks, consciousness finds that its sweetest pleasures are to be had in transgression against itself. For me, porn enacts something of this…But I don’t see how anybody is to get that exact impression from the paintings. Like I said, I don’t think paintings such as these work in that way. [In the paintings] the porn operates more like a framing device—for the audience—but also—and primarily—for me in their making.”
The pictured objects are oversized, in short perspective and flatten close up to us. Centrally, in almost all the images, a break of space intervenes. This space, however, nearly always turns out to be a reflected space, and a reflection taking place on a surface which is flat and pressing close to us—in a mirror or in glass. Alternately, the perceived space might be outside the immediate picture space, beyond a window—yet even here, it is the flat transparent plane of the window rather than the area beyond it whose presence is the more emphatic and determining. Along with this, while some of the pictures indicate movement (either of the car or the progression of the movie itself), they also reinforce the impression that the image is held within a still screen, further flattening and adding stratum. It is an unusual effect; though not so very far away from the perspectival flips and reflections in the surface in Monet’s Waterlillies or in windows of the balcony doors that Matisse angled open onto sunny Nice afternoons, it is effectively reversed. Whereas in Matisse and Monet a profound depth of space angling beyond and away from the picture plane is indicated, in McPartland’s paintings, this initial perception of space is ousted by the cramped and proximal; air and light staunched and swapped for a fug of indistinct matter.
Through these flips and reverses, via images and their obliteration, the painting is realised through a perpetual renegotiation of its terms. McPartland catalogues some of the avoidances and negations that necessitate the terms of his strategy: “I concentrated on painting because of its intrinsic and contemporary problems and difficulties; for me, in its sheer inappropriacy (and this I think is the only way to take the medium—the idea of a ‘Return to Painting’ strikes me as ridiculous—in its inappropriacy, it seemed appropriate. History has so fattened meaning and beauty that they’ve become like two sprung traps…To a crippling degree painting is hostaged to its history—its forms are insufficiently blank…Abstraction too easily lends itself to elegy on the one hand, and decoration on the other. And figuration signs too directly. It signs immediately…. [For this series] the images had to be—or appear to be, it’s the same here—second-hand; reality and invention both being too ‘hot.’”
Yet painting’s nature can’t be undone so completely, and I think this is part of McPartland’s gamble (Beckett’s injunction, “Fail better” was the title of his last solo show). His self-imposed strictures cannot be adhered to absolutely, at some point painting will get in the way. What Helmut Federle calls “the most generous medium,” will give something of itself. The work, 7. Fade, sails closest to prohibited beauty, to the elegiac. Possibly, it represents a closing fade from an already dark scene, but, in actuality, the image leaves us ignorant, just as it points to a narrative before and after which we are also to remain unaware of (the film itself). Yet neither the pop-ish air nor the perennial shadow of pornography suffices to rob it of its exquisite painterly-ness—it is a Reinhardt by Rembrandt.
One of the greatest conceits of our age is that it represents “The End of History.” And, regardless of whether it does or not, within our contemporary arts, it is an impression that is pervasive. Of all forms, painting is the most self-referential and historically sanctioned, and as such, over the last 30 years or so (a couple of expressionistic fulminations aside), the medium has progressively painted itself into a corner. Subject to either being shunt into reiterating a historically unilateral meaning or becoming a (historically enfranchised) quote, the medium itself shows signs of being sucked between inverted commas. McPartland’s (short) oeuvre appears a vigorous and concerted attempt to paint painting out of this historical dead-end—through the adopting and transposing of some of the mechanics of dead-endism itself. His recent works, complicated, visceral and perverse, are testament to the re-realising of painting’s unique voice and relevance.
