Still life with flowers on a piano. Still getting a grip on our reverse. Still trying to forget. This new colour feels different. My daughter is singing on the bow. The piano inserted from the imaginary which is a first for us but this is of course a topic that was taken up all those years ago and indeed perhaps sealed the fate of not only those two old subjects1 but so much of what followed through those earnestly experimental years of artistic modernism. Colour seems smooth, loose. Goes further. Not 20 to 1.2 We'll see on a nature study. You know the imaginary makes me think just how much Gaugain's vision turned out to be so much more an influence on the major figures of established 'museum modernism' Van Gogh of course has had one but who after he held such a belief in 'only going so far' both into the phyche and away from nature, from what is "real"? Was this the Harding?3 I'm sure not. Turps not up to scratch. Can you send the high end? Clearly the work of 'the special one'4 delves deep into the phyche and of course surrealism goes further down that rabbit hole (a la David Icke)5 but an idea nags and it is this; the death of Van Gogh signals the beggining of the end of plein air landscape painting as an avante garde strategy. And look here, it had only been going a few years since the Barbizon.6 Cezanne yes, but his influence led to the breaking of the picture plane, the plane of representation, which of course leads to one direction7 and that not into the 'plein air'. (enless the plein air between the ears counts!)
Interesting though it is it takes us no further. We can't imagine there is more to be done regards plein air painting or any other sort of painting in a strictly formal sense. In any case is it not one of our few concrete assertions that the form a work takes does not matter in the least in terms of conjuring critical or political content? Indeed we must not say that plein air painting is now somehow once again an avant garde strategy by which we mean an activity with political potential, no, we are saying that any and all activities can be made so, can have that power. It is rather the way that a political narrative can be weaved in that counts. To define the terms in which the 'doing' is framed and making this part of the work, like the CFU, the two parts becoming inseperable to the point of co-dependancy.8
After all does 'ART' not seem like an inadequatly vague term? Create 'worlds for doing' that define the activity and its politics. Create a solid base for action then act. There is no need to call on the 'le grand parapluie' of 'art' and if some institutional critique merchant like Fraser brings out the old art as an inescapable expanding field chestnut then good luck to her. She can ride that horse into the sunset!9
All that said, can we start again with Van Gogh and tac it onto the more revolutionary strand of modernism. Let's say Paris anarchists into DADA into the SI and the critique of consumer spectacle leading to institutional critique and its various revivals which must include our humble TAS? Your people will have to summize it, all I know is we must offer the people more than a loop.
This is now too much. I'm here to do the work: Still Life With Flowers on the Piano.
Yours,
John
1 Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh
2 In the text for work 10) John refers to a discussion with an employee of a art materials shop in which he was informed that top quality paint is far more economical than the lower price colours, as much as a 20 to 1 stroke ratio.
3 Refers to the Micheal Harding brand of oil paint. The paint sent to John by the Torpoint Art Service was actually Jacksons Artist Quality Oil Paint.
4 Highly likely to refer to Pablo Picasso. 'The special one' also refers to the successful Portugese association football coach Jose Mourinho
5 Going 'down the rabbit hole' is a metaphor for an entry into the unknown. The theorist and performer David Icke is often described as having gone further 'down the rabit hole' than ever before in promotional material. Originates from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
6 An influential group of painters active between 1830 - 1870 who together pineered the practice of 'plein air' painting. Van Gogh was particulary influeced by Charles Daubigny.
7 Almost certainly refers to the path to abstraction.
8 Refers to John's research at Newcastle University into artistic self-institution. John's research highlighted the importance of projects like the Copenhagen Free University for the way in which they created an institutional platform for action that becomes inseparable from the action itself.
9 Refers to Andrea Fraser's work with institutional critique particularly her assertion that art is a framework that cannot be exceeded and that any attempts to escape the 'frame' of 'art' are absorbed by the canon. This position has been widely criticised for its pessimistic outlook with regards to the political potential of art. The following is an extract of text John wrote for an Open Council report into the state of critical art practice in 2011: "Fraser's argument of the closure of the field of art, influenced by Peter Bruger's theories on the avant-garde and the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is strongly criticised by several writers for whom Fraser's essay represents a resigned, pessimistic and complicit state that urgently needs to be contested. For Raunig, Fraser evokes the problematic idea that "art is and remains autonomous, its function limited to its own field,” resulting in a “self limitation that barely permits reflection on one's own enclosure,” (Raunig, 2009, p. 6) while Holmes writes that Fraser's argument creates a subject that can do no more than contemplate his or her own psychic prison. (Holmes, 2009b, p. 58)