This image is a Chris Martin painting from a previous exhibition, for images of the current show see: the Mitchell-Innes & Nash site.
If you spend a lot of time looking at art there inevitably come moments when you find yourself liking things that you wouldn’t normally think of as the type of thing that you like and vice versa: things that seem like the type of thing that you’re usually predisposed to like but which nonetheless disappoint. In the case of Chris Martin’s show at Mitchell-Inness Nash, it was the latter, for me.
There is, after all, a lot to like about his work. There’s a seemingly fearless attitude toward painting at work here. He seems to be having fun. His big color fields – often in harsh unadultured primary colors or combinations of orange and green – on huge canvases - have an initially pleasing monumental presence. He's not shy about approaching the word “heroic.” With its grand scale, curvy oscillating forms, and characteristically loose facture this is painting that openly advertises its faith in “painting” as a vehicle for transcendance – an aspiration they advertise more successful than they fulfil.
The inclusion, here of several images of psychedelic mushrooms, gnomes smoking pipes, an oriental carpet used as a ground for painting, and images of Miles Davis, also all speak of a striving for transcendence or, perhaps, maybe just a valorization of mind-altering drugs. Martin’s commitment to painting itself encourages the former. Even so, these two attitudes (of painterly commitment and an almost Dada-esque habit of under-mining his own paintings by punching holes in them and attaching random pictures and objects) sit uncomfortably with each other. The images and objects themselves are treated as if their inclusion in the paintings is a stylistic choice rather than an encroachment on the painterly field by a contradictory attitude: hippy tapestries meet John Cage. It ends up feeling like he’s taken the lessons of Rauschenberg and Johns purely as stylistic cues. What’s weird about this is that one gets the sense that this is a vein of painting that has defined itself against the idea of “theory” and “post-modernism” as much as it defines itself in favor of anything else. His attitude seems to be, almost overtly, a calculated rejection of Warhol’s attitude even as he seems to owe a great many debts to Warhol.
The most jarring instance of this disjunction occurs in a painting of – of all things – Amy Winehouse. The painting looks like nothing so much as a mediocre Schnabel. Amy Winehouse’s face is crossed out with two overlapping, sloppily executed “T” shapes. It would be unmemorable except for the occurrence of a few haphazardly placed light-gray foot-prints – as if Martin simply stepped onto the still half-dry paint and the dust and grime on his soles adherred to the surface. It could easily be accidental although we know, from the context, anyway, that it isn’t. What’s jarring about this is how calculated its apparently chance occurrence appears to be. It seems not so much accidental, as in Pollock’s paintings – an incidental side-effect of painterly activity - as it seems to evoke Warhol’s parodic painting of dance-routine foot-patterns. Those paintings codified the idea of making a painting horizontally rather than vertically, declaring its status as a conventional move. What seems odd about this foot-print here is that it seems calculated to come off as uncalculated – as if we’re meant to applaud his insousciance for “breaking the rules” when we already know that this has been defined as a "rule." In his own words Martin describes his practice like this “The discipline is going into the studio and moving materials around. Then I just back off, suspend critical judgment, and just let things happens.” Maybe that “suspending critical judgment part isn’t such a great idea, actually.
If the boundary between painting and the world is so undeniably porous, then why hasn’t he let more of it in? The materials that he includes in his paintings suggest that we might put “anything” into a painting but then the “anything” that he lets in seems oddly proscribed. As numerous artists have demonstrated the familiar detritus of the world is adequate material for art, with or without paint. Likewise, painting remains perfectly capable on its own. Martin’s material promiscuity and painterly chops are all good things, but the confusion of means with ends strikes me as relatively myopic. If you’re going to open your paintings up to the world, open them up all the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment