Make & Do

Painting, In Theory

As was outlined in the last Small Night Broadcast, which was the first Small Night Broadcast, myself and Damien Flood have had a history of being interested in this word discourse, specifically, which we are naming now theory as a play of words in this ongoing project which will result in an ancillary exhibition of screen-printed objects, including a new zine called Tennis, subtitle, “Painting, in Theory.”

We’ve taken this direction because we emerged as painters at a time when theory was something in the air. It was something we were resistant to, as it was as obligatory, but also something we embraced as a form of criticality that now seems absent from painting practice. Damien went on to become a painter after graduating, represented by a commercial gallery, but within that setting he continued to create discourse — through public talks and publications that accompanied his exhibitions, inviting writers to write alongside or confront his work.

I myself went on to become a critic — what I term now a lapsed painter and fugitive art critic — who has set up a screen-printing studio attached to my house, where I have the freedom to print publications through ongoing collaborations with different artists and editors.

So for this first online assembly — for lack of a better term — we are inviting you to attend and discuss theory’s relationship to painting, which has never been a comfortable pairing. As in the title of the essay, joke, provocation — Why Are Conceptual Artists Making Paintings Now? Because they think it’s a good idea! — there has always been a gap between theory and painting. The only theory that was really forced upon painting, probably due to its absence within painting, was death theory, crisis theory.

But there is something that offers potential when you begin to question painting’s relationship to theory. It opens out onto other questions in relation to politics, language, meaning.

I myself have used theory as a critic, and in some ways it could be the reason I gave up painting, because I embraced theory fully. But I also think about painting through theory. Painting can offer more than product value, collector value, market value. It doesn’t have to simply embrace its materiality; it can question its materiality through theory, through criticality.

Can painting be political when we bring in the question of theory?

Can painting have meaning beyond its materiality?

Is this important to painters or to observers?

What happens when theory sits alongside painting?

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between theory, language and painting. It comes from reading texts around painting and the market and its crisis at the time of the global financial crash. There was something enriching about painting’s angst in relation to conceptual art, which was all about theory and less about materialism — about what is often reduced to make and do.

That phrase, make and do, is often used in a workshop sense, and sometimes as a diminishment — a way of suggesting that craft practices simply make and do without thinking through their making, without asking why. That they operate at the level of production rather than interrogation. Yet painting historically was in the social sphere, even in its biblical illustration. It was messaging. It was public. After photography, you see that beginning to fracture.

And yet painters such as Kerry James Marshall, and in a more oblique historical register Luc Tuymans, reflect both subjectively and objectively on the painter’s position in the world — whether through history, through race, through antagonism, or through a material antagonism toward technology.

But now, strangely, there has been an acquiescence. That word feels important. An acquiescence to the digital. Painting accepts that it will be represented digitally. In some ways it has been subjugated by the digital — we understand it first as a digital image in the world. Of course it has to be made in the real, but then it becomes something else. It becomes its representation. It circulates as that. When painters leave Instagram they are thought lapsed if not dead.

And that is what feels most interesting here.

Questions and Provocations

• When did theory first enter your studio?

• Has theory ever changed how you physically paint?

• Is resistance to theory itself a theoretical position?

• Has the reduction of painting to make and do confined it to craft rather than critical thought?

• Was painting ever truly outside the social sphere?

• Is painting’s materiality a refuge or a defence?

• What happens when painting acquiesces to the digital?

• When a painting circulates primarily as a JPEG, does the painting exist — or only its image?

• Does digitisation make painting “in theory” before it is encountered materially?

• If painting is experienced more often as a screen image than as an object, does it still exist as painting at all?

• Can painting interrogate its own subjugation to digital circulation?

• And finally: does painting today exist — or does it persist only in theory?

If you would like to take part in this first Small Night Assembly, painters can register their interest by emailing smallnightzine@gmail.com.

A date during Easter will be proposed to those who register.